
OpenPrescribing: England's medication prescription data - napoleoncomplex
https://openprescribing.net/
======
DanBC
This is amazing.

I do some work around suicide prevention.

Having access to this data means I can ask why so much co-proxamol (a
medication that has no evidence of effectiveness, but which is also very
dangerous) is being prescribed in Gloucestershire.

~~~
shitlord
I was taking a look around some of the data for antidepressants and was
wondering why there are sometimes such drastic decreases in spending. Spending
for Escitalopram dropped over 80% in a single month[1]. There are a few others
that had sharp drops in spending. Just curious, do you know why?

In any case, it would be really interesting to see how legislation, lobbying,
and current events (relative) may have affected this data.

[1]:
[https://openprescribing.net/chemical/0403030X0](https://openprescribing.net/chemical/0403030X0)

~~~
snthd
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escitalopram#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escitalopram#History)

Maybe the patent expiring. (WP talks about a US patent and this is the UK, so
it's a guess)

~~~
WeaselNo7
I read that as 'the patient expiring', which I believe would also have an
effect on drug use.

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tomjhill
I searched for the medicines I get from my GP and it turns out I'm the only
one getting them. You can see the blips in the graph from zero when I got the
prescriptions!

~~~
Symbiote
Isn't this a privacy issue? There are some very small GP offices. From the
HSCIC FAQ:

    
    
        I am prescribed a drug for a rare condition; can I be identified in this dataset?
    
        All practice level information down to presentation level is being released, but no
        information about patients is contained in the data. It is not possible to identify
        individual patients in the data.
        In line with the recent High Court ruling on the release of abortion statistics, data can
        be released unless an individual can be identified from the data or from other data
        that is already in the public domain. The release of practice level prescribing data
        does not enable the identification of individual patients.
        If you are the only patient receiving a certain drug in your practice then the number
        of items prescribed and their cost for that medicine will be in this dataset but it will
        not show which patient received it. Note that information about the price of drugs is
        already available in the public domain.
    

That last paragraph doesn't make sense. I can easily imagine someone who knows
a friend/relative has a rare condition using a data source like this to see
how often it's being prescribed, and (perhaps) whether they're taking the
medicine as often as they're supposed to.

~~~
notahacker
That was my first thought. I think it's brilliant that people with background
knowledge can assess unusual prescription patterns at GP practices, but this
is bound to release data that can give you a pretty good idea of [some of]
what some individuals with a particular rare condition are being prescribed.

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stewhuk
This is an amazing dataset. I did some work with it in 2012 at a hackathon, in
particular linking it to wiki entities. I used the redirects as drug synonyms
and automatically extracted and linked drug names to their Wikipedia pages,
which then offered more structured info on the drugs (eg side effects etc).
From that, I then did some basic NLP to identify diseases that mentioned those
drugs, thereby linking the diseases each drugs can be used to treat for
further analysis. The next step we didn't do much with was linking it to the
British national formulary - the uk clinical guidelines on drug use (a digital
version wasn't readily available then). You can see some of those wiki
datasets on my website ([http://www.stewh.com](http://www.stewh.com) \- I'm on
a train so can't get the exact url, but you should find it in the menu). I had
more datasets and the MapReduce code for working with the dataset and wiki
dumps if anyone could use it.

~~~
doktor_k
you might find the MEDI dataset useful. It links rxnorm to the ICD-9 codes the
medications are written for based on EHR and other data.

[https://medschool.vanderbilt.edu/cpm/center-precision-
medici...](https://medschool.vanderbilt.edu/cpm/center-precision-medicine-
blog/medi-ensemble-medication-indication-resource)

