Blog | Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science

12 Sep 2018

Smoothing seasonality - your feedback needed

Recently we created antimicrobial stewardship dashboards for every Clinical Commissioning Group and General Practice in England by grouping our measures (see our blog post here). We received feedback from users that some of our measures are difficult to understand, because they exhibit a high level of seasonal variation. Antibiotics show the most seasonality amongst our measures (e.g. openprescribing.net/measure/ktt9_antibiotics). As you can see below, it takes a lot of staring at this graph to work out whether the deciles (blue lines) are going up or down overall, and whether the red line (the data from a single CCG) is changing in relation to them.

30 Aug 2018

OpenPrescribing July 2018 newsletter

This newsletter was sent out on Thurs, Jul 26; sign up to receive the next one at www.openprescribing.net We do the stats to make your life easy… At OpenPrescribing we hide complicated data science “under the bonnet”: we want data to be easy, to come alive and tap you on the shoulder when there’s a problem. As you know we have an “alerts” service, open and free to anyone, that emails you if there’s a new issue with the prescribing at any practice.

23 Aug 2018

FDAAA TrialsTracker Milestones: 6 Months, >1200 trials, $500 Million in Fines

On February 19, 2018 we launched the FDAAA TrialsTracker, a tool that automatically monitors whether clinical trials are reporting their results to ClinicalTrials.gov in accordance with US law. We bring public accountability by ranking sponsors, and help researchers to comply with the law by showing them which of their trials are overdue. We also calculate the total fines the FDA could have imposed to date on non-compliers. This week marks two important milestones for the FDAAA TrialsTracker.

13 Jul 2018

New on OpenPrescribing — our measures now have categories!

Update: You can view a short Youtube video demonstrating this feature here. On our OpenPrescribing CCG and practice dashboards you can now filter measures by category to view a small group of related measures together. You can select a category using the new dropdown menu above the measures… …Or by clicking on a category listed at the bottom of the description of a measure. Upon selecting a category you’ll see its description / rationale above the measures:

5 Jul 2018

OpenPrescribing June 2018 Newsletter

Updates to OpenPrescribing Thanks largely to our new software developer Dave, we are making some improvements to the site. With the fresh-faced enthusiasm of a new starter, Dave has begun by tackling the various not-so-exciting but still important tasks which we’ve put off doing for ages. These changes are mostly behind the scenes, but you should hopefully notice that the site feels a bit snappier to browse. One of the changes which you can see is that we now clearly label on the site where a practice has closed or become dormant.

6 Jun 2018

OpenPrescribing May 2018 Newsletter

Low-Priority Prescribing Paper Published This week our latest paper was published, which describes the trends and variation in prescribing of medicines determined to be of “low-priority” by NHS England. We found that there has been an overall decrease in the prescribing volume of these medications, but despite this, costs have risen slightly. This is driven by higher costs per prescription for drugs such as liothyronine, trimipramine and coproxamol. You can see how much your practice/CCG spends on these items using our measure.

27 Apr 2018

"PPPI": why academics should engage Patients, the Public and Professionals

This is a brief blog about something small and trivial, but also big and important. Recently on the staircase my friend Carl Heneghan came out with a good line about “Patient and Public Involvement”, or “PPI” as it is known in the trade. “People talk about PPI,” he said: “but we need PPPI… patients, the public, and professionals.” I think this is absolutely correct. In academia, we often fail to focus on what happens at the coalface.

23 Apr 2018

OpenPrescribing April 2018 Newsletter

Homeopathy Paper Published Our new paper asks the question: Is use of homeopathy associated with poor prescribing in English primary care? The answer, yes. We found that general practices that have worse than average prescribing scores on our standard measures were more than twice as likely to prescribe homeopathy than practices with better than average scores. Interestingly, the level of homeopathy prescribing we found is quite low and is decreasing quite quickly.

19 Apr 2018

Unreported Clinical Trial of the Week Round-Up

In February, we posted our first Unreported Trial of the Week here in the Bennett Institute blog highlighting a trial from Columbia University. Since then, that trial has submitted results to ClinicalTrials.gov and Unreported Trial of the Week has moved to the BMJ! Each week we profile a new unreported clinical trial that has not reported results in accordance with their legal requirements. You can see all four trials we have profiled thus far as well as the introductory post at the BMJ.

29 Mar 2018

OpenPrescribing March 2018 Newsletter

Price Concessions - February The Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee (PSNC) have released 3 sets of price concession price lists for February 2018. Once again, the total amount for England for the month has reduced: we’ve estimated the impact as £9.37 million for February 2018, although this is based on December 2017 data (the latest available at time of writing), and is therefore likely to reduce slightly (as February has fewer days).

14 Mar 2018

An unreported clinical trial… from the FDA themselves

Our FDAAA TrialsTracker provides a public list of all trials required to report under the FDA Amendments Act of 2007 (FDAAA). We update every weekday with live data showing who has, and has not, reported their results in accordance with the law. You can read our full methods in our preprint paper. One unreported trial last week stood out: this trial was sponsored by the FDA, the agency in charge of enforcing the reporting requirements of the FDAAA.

13 Mar 2018

Price concessions for February 2018

The Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee (PSNC) have released 3 sets of price concession price lists for February 2018. Once again, the total amount for England for the month has reduced: we’ve estimated the impact as £9.37 million for February 2018, although this is based on December 2017 data (the latest we have), and is therefore likely to reduce slightly (as February has fewer days). The total for 2017-18 so far is £308.

8 Mar 2018

Welcoming our new Bennett Institute team member, Darren Smyth: a lawyer!

Here at the Bennett Institute we are a truly multidisciplinary team: clinicians, academics and software engineers, working together to produce tools, as well as papers. This is glorious fun, and productive. From our time working together as a team we now have software engineers who know about clinical trials, prescribing data, and more; and we have researchers and clinicians who know a bit about building websites. This may or may not thrill you, but I will share it: our academics write code that runs live on our websites!

7 Mar 2018

Our FDAAA TrialsTracker is already helping to get new trials reported!

When we launched our FDAAA TrialsTracker we wanted to produce a tool that would improve clinical trial reporting, rather than another repetitive academic journal paper that simply documents the extent of the problem. This reflects our ethos in the Bennett Institute: clinicians, academics and software engineers, working together to produce tools, as well as papers. Two weeks after launch we have had extensive media coverage, and a lot of great user feedback.

2 Mar 2018

Bad results from drug trials no longer have a place to hide

“If you’re a huge company trying to develop a new drug or treatment, the temptation to hide ‘bad’ results might be a strong one. Until now, you would be able to hide those results with few consequences.” In this Wired article, Abigail Beall, discusses the Alltrials campaign and the FDAAA TrialsTracker

28 Feb 2018

OpenPrescribing February 2018 Newsletter

Price Concessions - starting to reduce? The latest price concession information for January has been released by the PSNC (in fact, two sets of data in quick succession). The PSNC have also stated that they are “still in discussion with the DHSC regarding further January 2018 price concessions”. Therefore we have made some calculations based on what we know at the moment - as soon as there are changes we will update this blog.

28 Feb 2018

Unreported Trial of the Week: NCT01846221

With the launch of our FDAAA TrialsTracker, applicable trials that have failed to report their results on ClinicalTrials.gov are starting to appear. If you go here on our Tracker (the “All Trials” view, and toggle the “due” filter) you can see all the trials that have not yet reported. Non-reporting of clinical trial results in an ongoing, global public health issue. We are going to start highlighting some of these unreported trials in blog posts to shine a light on what information is being withheld from the public as a result of non-reporting.

27 Feb 2018

Making the FDAAA TrialsTracker even better than current ClinicalTrials.gov data

When you produce online tools from data, you often get useful feedback that helps you improve the outputs. (Send us feedback any time!). Additionally, when you use data, you learn about interesting glitches in it, some of which can be entirely undocumented. Here we share one example of helpful feedback, and how we used it to improve our tool. First some background. Trial reporting is a huge problem in medicine: the results of clinical trials are routinely withheld from doctors, researchers, and patients.