Hospital Rx Data
Hospital usage data enables us to look at monthly data by Trust for all products used
Summary of Hospital Rx Data Available
NHS Digital publishes secondary care medicines data under the Government Open Licence. The Hospital Rx data provides processed pharmacy stock control data for all NHS Trusts in England.
This is a monthly dataset with Hospital Rx data available at molecule form and strength level, approximately 6 weeks after the end of the month. Back data has been made available from January 2019.
The Hospital Rx data has been launched with a single metric – the total quantity in the Virtual Medicinal Product Unit. For the vast majority of pharmaceuticals this is equivalent to the quantity metric found in the primary care Rx data.
We also have cash value data available, helping clients understand how much products cost, as well as volume sales. Indicative cost data is used as NHS hospital pricing contracts are confidential, as are NICE Patient Access Scheme prices. This new information on the indicative cost of medicines supplied is included within the SCMD dataset.
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Benefits of Hospital Rx Data
The Hospital Rx data is published with the normal Open Licence terms and, most importantly, is permitted for commercial use. The data includes 94.6% of hospital pharmacy issued medicines. It does not include medicines prescribed in secondary care which have been dispensed in the community, but these data are published separately.
Early documentation implies that Hospital Rx data is a limited time dataset. However the NHS has expressed a desire to use this for monitoring going forward, so it is likely that it will be extended.
Opposite is an extract with a look at biologic prescribing for the main Trusts in London. You will notice the lack of co-ordination at present.
Why work with CSL for your next HRx project?
While the Hospital Rx data are freely available and can be downloaded directly from the NHS Digital website each month, CSL offers ongoing subscriptions or ad-hoc extracts of this data. The benefits of working with CSL include:
Custom Extracts Each month’s raw data has around 1/3 million records – CSL produce manageable extracts of bespoke markets as defined by the customer. This ensures that you only have the necessary data, removing the need to clean and process. On top of that, our HRx data is grouped to molecule level, and can be structured into custom markets.
Update Monitoring CSL monitor the website and process the data extracts as soon as new data is published, ensuring you have the most accurate and recent data to work with.
Data quality checking CSL protect the accuracy of your data via Machine learning quality checks on the Hospital Rx data before extracts are created. We also publish quality metrics at a Trust level to help you understand where Hospital Rx data is reliable and where it is less reliable.
Actionable insight CSL offers consultancy and insights support to help you get the most from the HRx data. Whether it be hospital profiling to understand adoption, Loyalty/consistency scoring or insights into product mix, we have extensive experience in working with HRx data to generate key insights .
Limitations
NHS Digital will be publishing Hospital Rx data monthly, but 45% of the data sources from which the extract is based are subject to revision when a full year refresh is published in the May of each year (for the financial year just finished). Up to that point data is provisional. At the current time, two NHS Trusts are not providing data:
• UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON HOSPITALS NHS FOUNDATION TRUST (RRV)
• GREAT ORMOND STREET HOSPITAL FOR CHILDREN NHS FOUNDATION TRUST (RP4)
CSL understands that these Trusts are also missing from other industry standard datasets.
Over 8,000 products are provided, but no structure is provided to group these. Structure files are available from TRUD, but these are subject to an additional usage licence from SNOMED, and as such cannot be used for commercial purposes.