On 12/01/2012 13:09, Stefan Magdalinski wrote:
On 12 Jan 2012, at 15:19, Mark Goodge wrote:
On 27/12/2011 15:55, Caroline Flyn wrote:
Hi all,
Does anyone know of anyone/ any organisations who are analysing the new
GP-practice level prescription data?
Just out of interest, what sort of information do you think it would be
useful/interesting to extract from it?
regional variations in prescriptions, especially of things like valium and
viagra
That's potentially interesting. It would need to be correlated with
population figures to be meaningful, though. The data has figures for
individual practices, and practices have postcodes, so you can plot
prescriptions against postcodes in a way which will act as a reasonable
proxy for regions. But the practice data doesn't include any indication
of how many patients each practice has, so a simple numeric comparison
is meaningless - you can't tell if a practice prescribing double the
amount of Viagra to another practice is doing so because of higher
demand or simply because it has correspondingly more patients.
On the other hand, ratios might be useful - if practice A has (say) a
3/1 ratio of Valium to Viagra, but practice B has a 2/1 ratio then
that's potentially interesting.
regional variations in prescription of generics vs branded
That isn't possible directly, since the data only lists drugs by
chemical name and BNF code - it doesn't drill down into brands and/or
sources. But it might be possible to use cost as a proxy for that - if
two practices prescribe approximately the same quantities of a
particular drug, but one spends considerably more than the other, then
something is clearly affecting that.
Mark
--
Sent from my Babbage Difference Engine 2
http://mark.goodge.co.uk
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