pharmacy-first-data-development

We plan to explore codes applicable to the Pharmacy First service. New dataflows are being established between pharmacies and GP practice systems to communicate in a structured way the patient examinations, diagnoses and prescriptions occurring in pharmacies and transfer them into patients’ GP records. However, we are unsure of how the data will look, e.g. which codes will be used.

This work will require exploring two new fields not used before in OpenSAFELY: (1) medication status - this should indicate when a prescription was issued by community pharmacy versus general practice or other settings, which could be useful for multiple future applications if it is well populated; (2) consultation_id - this should allow all the clinical codes related to each interaction in a pharmacy to be extracted from GP Records together (e.g. symptoms, diagnoses, prescriptions) and unambiguously, without conflation with any other consultations which might occur on the same date.