OpenPrescribing Hospitals: An open access analytics platform for hospital medicines use in England

Abstract

Primary care prescribing data for general practices in England has been openly published since 2011. The OpenPrescribing platform provides an open, transparent and easy-to-use interface to this data. OpenPrescribing is widely used by NHS professionals, the public and by industry and has supported analyses to identify cost-saving opportunities and unsafe prescribing in primary care in England. The Secondary Care Medicines Data, published since July 2021 makes analogous data for medicines issued in NHS trusts in England available for the first time. As with primary care prescribing data, this dataset requires extensive domain and technical knowledge to access, clean, transform and link to other external sources before it can be used effectively. We have developed the OpenPrescribing Hospitals platform to provide an intuitive interface to the dataset, built on top of a robust data pipeline that removes the barriers to the dataset’s use. This platform is openly accessible, with transparent methodology and aims to deliver the same benefits as OpenPrescribing. Here we describe why the platform is needed, its key features, and highlight potential use cases. We encourage adoption of the platform by clinicians, academics and policy advisors to support rapid local feedback against national medicines standards and to monitor the extent and variation of uptake of new medicines