The words NHS prescribing data is written in.
Sixteen terms that decide whether a prescribing chart gets read correctly. Written for people who buy and sell medicines, not for statisticians. Each entry says what the thing is, why it matters commercially, and where it will mislead you.
The monthly NHSBSA dataset behind almost every NHS prescribing chart: every item dispensed in the community in England, by practice and presentation.
Monthly hospital medicines data for England: what NHS trusts issued, in unit-of-measure quantities, with indicative costs.
The NHS standard dictionary of medicines: the identifiers that let prescribing datasets join to each other.
The 15-character legacy hierarchy the NHSBSA uses to code prescribing data, from chapter down to individual presentation.
The NHSBSA's own prescribing analytics tool. NHS organisations get it; companies do not.
One item is one product on one prescription form, dispensed once. It is the unit of NHS prescribing volume, and it is not a patient.
The units dispensed within an item: tablets, millilitres, grams. Useful, and easy to aggregate into nonsense.
The list price of what was dispensed, before discounts. The spend figure in open prescribing data, and a ceiling rather than a bill.
Age-and-sex weighted prescribing units for a specific therapeutic group, so practices with different populations can be compared fairly.
Age, sex and temporary resident originated prescribing units: the general-purpose weighting for comparing overall prescribing between practices.
The WHO's assumed average adult maintenance dose, used to compare prescribing volumes across drugs and strengths.
The Drug Tariff category where generic reimbursement prices are reset quarterly from manufacturer sales data. The reason generic prices move in steps.
Temporary reimbursement increases granted when pharmacies cannot buy at the Drug Tariff price. The closest thing open data has to a shortage signal.
The NHS bodies that plan and pay for services, medicines included, for their area of England.
Free commercial use of most UK public sector data, on one substantive condition: attribute the source.
A near-identical successor to a biologic medicine after exclusivity ends. Not a generic, and visible in open data in a way generics never are.
Definitions are the warm-up.
Every one of these terms is load-bearing somewhere on our molecule pages: items and NIC in the scorecards, the BNF hierarchy behind every chart, SCMD in the hospital split. Pick a molecule and watch them earn their keep.