OpenPrescribing Hospitals, an Open Access Analytics Platform for Hospital Medicines Use in England: Development and Implementation Study

Abstract

Background

The Secondary Care Medicines Data (SCMD) makes detailed data on medicines issued by National Health Service (NHS) hospital trusts in England openly available for the first time. These data provide an opportunity to understand medicine use patterns, highlight variation, and drive improvements in evidence-based practice, prescribing safety, and cost-effectiveness. However, this dataset requires extensive domain and technical knowledge to access, clean, transform, and link to other external sources before it can be used effectively.

Objective

This study aimed to describe the development, implementation, and functionality of OpenPrescribing Hospitals and showcases example use cases. OpenPrescribing Hospitals is an open-access platform for analyzing hospital medicines use in England using the SCMD.

Methods

We developed a data pipeline that imports the SCMD and links further medicinal product information from the dictionary of medicines and devices, organization information from the Organisation Reference Data, and medicines classifications and measurement information from the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical and Defined Daily Dose index. Using these linked data, we calculated alternative measures of quantity to support appropriate comparison across the products reported. These data are presented through an open-access web platform with 3 main features: Submission History, Measures, and Analyse. We describe these features through illustrative use cases. We also summarize the web analytics collected between the platform launch in February 2025 and September 2026.

Results

The platform supports open, accessible use of preprocessed hospital medicines data and supports analysis and comparisons across NHS trusts, Integrated Care Boards, NHS regions, ingredients, and therapeutic groups. The Submission History feature displays patterns that can indicate changes in the completeness and consistency of data submissions by NHS trusts. The Measures feature presents predefined measures and benchmarking based on national medicines recommendations. The Analyse feature supports detailed user-defined analyses. Illustrative examples show how incomplete submissions can affect apparent medicines use and how the platform can surface trends and variation in the issuing of selected medicines. As of September 2026, the platform attracts approximately 1000 unique visitors monthly and has been used to run more than 20,000 custom analyses.

Conclusions

OpenPrescribing Hospitals reduces the technical barriers to analyzing hospital medicines data in England. The platform is openly accessible and accompanied by extensive documentation to support transparent and reproducible analyses. 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 of and variation in the uptake of new medicines. This early report does not assess usability, clinical outcomes, prescribing changes, or cost savings. Further research is needed to evaluate data validity, user experience, and effects on medicine optimization.