PrAna: an interactive web-based tool to explore prescribing data in England with spatiotemporal trends

During the last decade, wide range of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) have been identified and quantified in aquatic environment across several studies and indicated their impacts on exposed environmental species and humans. For the prediction of total amount of the APIs released to the environment, information about APIs consumption data is vital. Globally, several methods were reported to estimate the APIs consumption data based on the national prescription data, manufacturers, importers and dispenser’s data.
In the UK, national prescription data provided by National Health Service was used to calculate the consumption data, however, they are limited to a geographical region and or to a group of drugs.
The aim of this study is to aggregate and normalize prescription data to calculate total prescribed quantity of different APIs and to develop a tool, to explore spatiotemporal trends of different APIs using the processed dataset for wider use.