In December 2015, after several years of development, the website OpenPrescribing.net was launched online. The brainchild of doctor and author Ben Goldacre and computer programmer Anna Powell-Smith, the website (which is still in beta) is the first of its kind in the UK, and offers free, comprehensive access to anonymized data concerning National Health Service (NHS) prescribing patterns and healthcare spending in England.
“If we want to improve standards in healthcare we need good data that can be accessed and interpreted quickly,” insists Goldacre. “With a very small amount of funding we’ve taken prescribing data from the NHS and made it open to everyone and free to access. Doctors and others in the NHS can get useful simple feedback on prescribing behaviors that are potentially wasteful, or even harmful. Crucially this service is fully open: that means everyone can see the data and use it, whether they are a practice manager, a patient, a journalist, a member of the public, a doctor, or a researcher,” he adds. So what do prescribing patterns for ophthalmic conditions reveal? The charts (Figures 1–8) show some very interesting patterns, perhaps unsurprisingly, the seasonal variation in prescription of certain drugs (antibacterials, corticosteroids) and perhaps more surprisingly, the rising spend on anti-infectives over the past 12 months alone. With the caveat that the site is still under development (currently, the data on anti-VEGF agents is… sparse), it offers a new and engaging way of analyzing prescription patterns in England and will no doubt continue to reveal some interesting trends.
