PrAna: An R package to calculate and visualize England NHS primary care prescribing data

Abstract

Background The objective of this work to calculate prescribed quantity of an active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) in prescription medications for human use, to facilitate research on the prediction of amount of API released to the environment and create an open-data tool to facilitate spatiotemporal and long-term prescription trends for wider usage. Design We have developed an R package, PrAna to calculate the prescribed quantity (in kg) of an APIs by postcode using England’s national level prescription data provided by National Health Service, for the years 2015–2018. Datasets generated using Prana can be visualized in a real-time interactive web-based tool, PrAnaViz to explore spatiotemporal and long-term trends. The visualisations can be customised by selecting month, year, API, and region. Results PrAnaViz’s targeted API approach is demonstrated with the visualisation of prescribed quantities of 14 APIs in the Bath and North East Somerset (BANES) region during 2018. Once the APIs list is loaded, the back end retrieves relevant data and populates the graphs based on user-defined data features in real-time. These plots include the prescribed quantity of APIs over a year, by month, and individual API by month, general practice, postcode, and medicinal form. The non-targeted API approach is demonstrated with the visualisation of clarithromycin prescribed quantities at different postcodes in the BANES region. Conclusion PrAna and PrAnaViz enables the analysis of spatio-temporal and long-term trends with prescribed quantities of different APIs by postcode. This can be used as a support tool for policymakers, academics and researchers in public healthcare, and environmental scientist to monitor different group of pharmaceuticals emitted to the environment and for prospective risk assessment of pharmaceuticals in the environment.

Wastewater-based epidemiology for comprehensive community health diagnostics in a national surveillance study: mining biochemical markers in wastewater

“…GP surgeries information, such as, postcode and number of people registered were obtained from NHS Digital (https://digital.nhs.uk/). We have used our in-house PrAna tool (Jagadeesan, Grant et al 2022) to identify the GP surgeries present in each WWTPs catchment zone. The WWTPs catchment maps were used (with permission from all participating water utilities) to identify and collect GP surgeries information inside each catchment region, including number of patients registered using R for statistical computing and graphics.…”