Kishore Jagadeesan

2020-07-17

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 (NHS), was used to calculate the consumption data. This data is freely accessible and consist of individual files for each month. With the large file with over 10 million records every month, the data from the NHS cannot be used for the direct calculation of the prescription levels of different APIs. Re-organisation and processing of the files is required before to do any exploration or analysis and to speed up the data reading.

The aim of PrAna is to aggregate and normalize prescription data to calculate total prescribed quantity of different APIs, using open source statistical software R language. The name is an acronym for Prescription Analysis

Apart, from the calculation of the total prescribed quantity of an API or a group of APIs, specified to a postcode or region, We have also developed, an open interactive web-based tool, PrAnaViz with the processed dataset for the period 2015 to 2018.

PrAnaViz facilitates users to visualise, explore and report different spatiotemporal and long-term prescription trends for wider use.

A tutorial for PrAnaViz (accessible at here)