Using NHS Prescribing Data for Pharma Market Research
8th October 2021 . By Vicci N
Prescribing data containing details of the prescriptions written across England and dispensed in the United Kingdom is released by the NHS every month. This data is freely available online and easily accessible, but the raw data can be difficult to work with due to the very large data volumes. Nevertheless, with the right tools, NHS prescribing data can be used to transform the UK pharma market and simplify the work of marketing professionals working in the pharma industry.
What is the English Prescribing Data?
Every month in England, the NHS releases anonymised open data about the drugs, medicines, and other prescribed items that have been dispensed by GPs across the country. This data should be considered extremely valuable to the UK pharma market, as well as to medicine and healthcare professionals working across all sectors of public and private healthcare in Britain.
The prescribing data includes various data points, including:
- Which medicine has been prescribed
- How much medicine has been prescribed
- What kind of condition the medicine is typically used to treat
- Where the prescription was made
Each monthly dataset is vast, incorporating over 700 million rows each month, which can mean...
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