Ways to get NHS prescribing data, honestly compared.
There are five realistic routes to NHS prescribing data, and two of them are free. We sell one of the five, so read this the way you'd read any vendor's comparison page: sceptically. We've tried to make that scepticism unnecessary by saying plainly when the right answer is not us.
| Route | Cost | Who can use it | Covers | Effort to run |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenPrescribing | Free | Anyone | GP prescribing, England | None |
| ePACT2 | Free to the NHS | NHS organisations only | Primary care, deep detail | None, if you qualify |
| Raw NHSBSA data | Free data, paid people | Anyone with an engineer | Everything open data holds | A pipeline, forever |
| Panel data (IQVIA et al.) | Quoted, rarely small | Enterprise buyers | Brand share, patient-level insight | Procurement, then none |
| DoseTrend | £1,500/month per molecule, published | Approved applicants | Primary + hospital, England + devolved | None |
Built by the Bennett Institute at the University of Oxford, free, and excellent. Practice-level exploration of GP prescribing in England with a clean interface and serious methodology behind it. If your question is "what is this practice or ICB prescribing", start here, and if it answers you, use it and pay nobody.
It is built for the NHS and researchers rather than for commercial molecule tracking. There are no per-molecule briefings, no class market-share framing, no devolved nations view, and hospital medicines are not its centre of gravity. Those gaps are DoseTrend's whole job, which is why we recommend OpenPrescribing without nerves.
The NHSBSA's own analytics tool over prescribing data, with practice-level detail and standard reports. It is restricted to NHS and related organisations: ICBs, practices, national bodies. If you work for one, ask for a login and stop reading this page.
If you work in industry, you cannot get access, and that is a policy position rather than a waiting list. The open data extracts carry most of the same numbers; the tooling is the part you have to source elsewhere.
Everything DoseTrend is built on is free to download: the English Prescribing Dataset at roughly 80 million rows a month, hospital medicines in SCMD, the devolved nations' own publications. The Open Government Licence lets you use all of it commercially. This is the honest benchmark for what we charge: £0 plus an engineer.
The engineer is the catch. You need a pipeline, storage measured in hundreds of gigabytes, per-nation quirks, and maintenance when schemas shift. They do shift; ours has broken on schema-era changes and ICB reorganisations, and fixing that is part of what the subscription buys. If you have a data team with spare capacity, build it. Most of our customers could, and decided their team's time was worth more than £1,500 a month.
IQVIA and its peers sell what open data structurally cannot hold: manufacturer and brand share of generic markets, patient-level treatment flows, launch analogues across countries. If your question needs those, no amount of open-data cleverness substitutes. Buy panel data. That is not modesty; it is how the data works, and we say the same on every molecule page.
Prices are quoted rather than published, contracts are annual, and the product is built for enterprise accounts. For the narrower question DoseTrend answers, what the NHS actually dispensed and spent, molecule by molecule, month by month, you would be paying for a great deal you do not need.
One molecule, £1,500 a month, price published, unlimited seats. Primary care and hospital dispensing joined into one picture for England, with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland alongside. Updated within 48 hours of each NHSBSA release, with a monthly briefing PDF written by a human.
Access is by application because about one applicant in ten has a question open data cannot answer, and we would rather say so before money moves than after. If that is you, we will point you at one of the four options above, usually the free ones.
Start with your molecule.
Every molecule has a free page with the national trend, cost per item and the regional picture. Look before you apply.