Medicine Data for Secondary Uses

In May 2024 we published documentation to enable us to collect medicine data weekly from each hospital in England with an electronic prescribing and medicines administration system (ePMA). This is to create a collection of information about medicines that have been prescribed and given to patients; whilst in hospital, when being discharged back to the care of their GP, and when they are being treated as outpatients.

The collection will initially be from the hospital’s main ePMA system that covers most of their wards. Many hospitals have more than one ePMA system, with different systems being used for specialities such as cancer, dialysis, intensive care, maternity, and ophthalmology. We will consider how we could collect data from the speciality ePMA systems in the future.

Organisations that want to access the data are required to seek approval by completing NHS England’s Data Access Request Service process, which examines:

• why the organisation wants access
• what the benefits will be (there must be a benefit to health and/or social care)
• that cyber security and restricted access mechanisms are in place
• if a suitable Data Sharing Agreement or Data Sharing Framework Contract is in place

All organisations will need to use Secure Data Environments to access the data. NHS England takes its responsibility to safeguard patient data extremely seriously and data shared by us is subject to strict rules around privacy, security and confidentiality.

Data collection will start on 13 January 2025, with the data being available for analysis and research from that date.

We will retrospectively collect older data from June 2018, which increases the usefulness of the data for analysis, as it covers the period before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, and also matches the date ranges for medicine data collected for primary care dispensing.