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ben goldacre
@bengoldacre
, 9 tweets, 5 min read Read on Twitter
Out of stock medicines are in the news today.

bbc.co.uk/news/health-46…

On our OpenPrescribing.net we have data for every individual one of 8,000 GP practices and CCGs showing whether you're affected, and what changes you can make.

THREAD...

ebmdatalab.net/price-concessi…
The first thing to note is how quickly the costs from out of stock medicines in the NHS are rising. Here's our dashboard for the whole of England:

openprescribing.net/all-england/co…

Note that the costs are rising very substantially, and very rapidly. Now...
..Nov and Dec are listed as "projected", but those projections are likely to be very accurate. We are not projecting stock problems, just individual practices' usage volumes, and those tend not to change very much from month to month. Let me explain....
..For every practice, we take the number of pills they issued LAST month for each of THIS month's out-of-stock medicines. Usage generally doesn't change much from month-to-month. Then we apply the new "out of stock" price for this month, to calculate each practice's excess costs.
At OpenPrescribing.net we check EVERY DAY to see if there are any new stock shortages, and price shocks. How?

WITH A ROBOT.

Here he is, in our @EBMDataLab team Slack channel. Busily working at 2am, looking for price shocks while we all sleep. Mmm, code, lovely automation.
@EBMDataLab And the work of EBMbot doesn't end there. Every time our price robot finds a price shock, it calculates the cost impact for every single one of 8,000 practices and 200 CCGs in the country. And then updates the practice and CCG dashboards. Instantly.

Because CODE IS GOOD.
Great to see @BBCNews using our @openprescribing data in their news story on out of stock medicines costing the NHS >£100m. As always, we have current data, bespoke, in lovely dashboards, for every single practice and CCG in the country!

bbc.co.uk/news/health-46…
Oh balls it's 16:59 and I have one more openprescribing.net feature to launch to you all before the end of the working week. One minute....
NEW TOOL KLAXXON

Just before Xmas we announced we had found a staggering £10m in new NHS savings due to a weird glitch: "Ghost Branded Generics".

TODAY: A NEW TOOL

For every single GP practice and CCG, we now show you all the changes you need to make.

ebmdatalab.net/ghost-branded-…
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More from @bengoldacre see all

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ben goldacre
@bengoldacre
YES.

We take NHS data. We use clinical, epidemiology, stats and engineering skills. We turn it into DIGITAL TOOLS rather than boring papers. Massively higher impact. Same datasets. Same skills. No recognition in REF. No funding streams.

Academia is trapped in the 19th Century.
... A couple of people have suggested that academics producing software and tools for coalface staff ARE rewarded in REF because you could submit them as REF "Impact Case Studies". Let me explain why that is not in any sense parity of esteem, or practical...
.. Every academic is required to submit lots of papers to be recognised as excellent in REF (fine by me btw, I've got plenty).

But "Impact Case Studies"? Each organisation submits 10 for the first 160 full time staff, then one for every extra 50 staff..

ref.ac.uk/media/1034/ref…
Read 16 tweets
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ben goldacre
@bengoldacre
PHARMACISTS.

Today @NHSEngland will announce their new "do not prescribe" list for primary care.

Within an hour we will have graphs and data on openprescribing.net showing prescribing levels for these medicines at every individual GP practice in England.
@NHSEngland PHARMACISTS
JOURNALISTS
DOCTORS

@NHSEngland today announced a new "Do Not Prescribe" list

We've made graphs showing *every* *single* GP practice's prescribing of these items. You can drill down to CCG level, and then practice level.

Took us one hour...

openprescribing.net/measure/?tags=…
@NHSEngland Today @NHSEngland asked doctors to stop using Aliskiren, as NICE HT guidance says insufficient evidence of benefit, especially long term.

On our @OpenPrescribing you can see which CCGs are using it the most. Click on a CCG to see individual practices.

openprescribing.net/measure/lpalis…
Read 19 tweets
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ben goldacre
@bengoldacre
Today has seen a gigantic global fuss about the woeful state of devices regulation. The Royal College of Surgeons has come out and said things need to change. What's gone wrong, and why does it take *journalists* to point it out, rather than regulators / researchers?

Thread..
...
Firstly, and this is the key problem: essentially, nobody is paid to look at medicines and devices regulations, check compliance, and critically review our frameworks to see if they're up to scratch.

Where is the NIHR "Regulatory Science" funding stream? Nowhere...
.. pretty much all the papers you see on problems with medicines/device regulations, by folk like @carlheneghan and me, and others, are done in "weekend and evening" time. They're not funded. You sneak them in. They are derrogated by the system to the status of *hobbies*....
Read 13 tweets

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Stuart Budd #PeoplesVote 🇬🇧🇪🇺❄️
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Oh the geezers are hard at it grafting media, it's always great to have easy scapegoats "North Korean cyber gangs.." a.msn.com/01/en-ie/AAt9g…
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