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I searched for the medicines I get from my GP and it turns out I'm the only one getting them. You can see the blips in the graph from zero when I got the presc

I searched for the medicines I get from my GP and it turns out I'm the only one getting them. You can see the blips in the graph from zero when I got the prescriptions!

Symbiote 11y ago
Isn't this a privacy issue? There are some very small GP offices. From the HSCIC FAQ: I am prescribed a drug for a rare condition; can I be identified in this dataset? All practice level information down to presentation level is being released, but no information about patients is contained in the data. It is not possible to identify individual patients in the data. In line with the recent High Court ruling on the release of abortion statistics, data can be released unless an individual can be identified from the data or from other data that is already in the public domain. The release of practice level prescribing data does not enable the identification of individual patients. If you are the only patient receiving a certain drug in your practice then the number of items prescribed and their cost for that medicine will be in this dataset but it will not show which patient received it. Note that information about the price of drugs is already available in the public domain. That last paragraph doesn't make sense. I can easily imagine someone who knows a friend/relative has a rare condition using a data source like this to see how often it's being prescribed, and (perhaps) whether they're taking the medicine as often as they're supposed to.
- tomjhill 11y ago
  On your last point, you can actually tell the months when I didn't collect a prescription.
- notahacker 11y ago
  That was my first thought. I think it's brilliant that people with background knowledge can assess unusual prescription patterns at GP practices, but this is bound to release data that can give you a pretty good idea of [some of] what some individuals with a particular rare condition are being prescribed.

I searched for the medicines I get from my GP and it turns out I'm the only one getting them. You can see the blips in the graph from zero when I got the prescriptions!

Symbiote 11y ago

Isn't this a privacy issue? There are some very small GP offices. From the HSCIC FAQ: I am prescribed a drug for a rare condition; can I be identified in this dataset? All practice level information down to presentation level is being released, but no information about patients is contained in the data. It is not possible to identify individual patients in the data. In line with the recent High Court ruling on the release of abortion statistics, data can be released unless an individual can be identified from the data or from other data that is already in the public domain. The release of practice level prescribing data does not enable the identification of individual patients. If you are the only patient receiving a certain drug in your practice then the number of items prescribed and their cost for that medicine will be in this dataset but it will not show which patient received it. Note that information about the price of drugs is already available in the public domain. That last paragraph doesn't make sense. I can easily imagine someone who knows a friend/relative has a rare condition using a data source like this to see how often it's being prescribed, and (perhaps) whether they're taking the medicine as often as they're supposed to.

tomjhill 11y ago
On your last point, you can actually tell the months when I didn't collect a prescription.
notahacker 11y ago
That was my first thought. I think it's brilliant that people with background knowledge can assess unusual prescription patterns at GP practices, but this is bound to release data that can give you a pretty good idea of [some of] what some individuals with a particular rare condition are being prescribed.