Carl Reynolds of the Open Knowledge Foundation reports, “Last week saw the launch of prescribinganalytics.com (covered in the Economist and elsewhere). At present it’s ‘just’ a nice data visualisation of some interesting open data that show the NHS could potentially save millions from its drug budget. I say ‘just’ because we’re in discussions with several NHS organizations about providing a richer, tailored, prescribing analytics service to support the best use of NHS drug budgets. Working on the project was a lot of fun, and to my mind the work nicely shows the spectacular value of open data when combined with people and internet.”

He goes on, “The data was, and is, out there. All 11 million or so rows of it per month, detailing every GP prescription in England. Privately, some people expressed concern that failure to do anything with the data so far was undermining efforts to make it public at all. Once data is open it takes time for people to discover a reason for doing something interesting with it, and to get organized to do it. There’s no saying what people will use the data for, but provided the data isn’t junk there’s a good bet that sooner or later something will happen.”

Read more here.

Image: Courtesy PrescribingAnalytics.com