Net ingredient cost (NIC).
The list price of what was dispensed, before discounts. The spend figure in open prescribing data, and a ceiling rather than a bill.
Net ingredient cost is the cost of a dispensed medicine at its published list price, usually the Drug Tariff price, before any discounts, rebates or dispensing fees. It is the spend figure in the open data and the one on DoseTrend charts.
The NHS's true cost is lower. Community dispensing is adjusted for average discounts in the separate actual cost field, typically a few percent below NIC, and hospital prices sit behind confidential discounts that open data will never show. Read NIC as a consistent, comparable index of spend at list price. It is very good at that, and it is nothing else.
English Prescribing Data (EPD) · The monthly NHSBSA dataset behind almost every NHS prescribing chart: every item dispensed in the community in England, by practice and presentation.
Secondary Care Medicines Data (SCMD) · Monthly hospital medicines data for England: what NHS trusts issued, in unit-of-measure quantities, with indicative costs.
Category M · The Drug Tariff category where generic reimbursement prices are reset quarterly from manufacturer sales data. The reason generic prices move in steps.
See it on a real molecule.
Every molecule page uses this term somewhere: in the scorecard, the charts or the honesty strip. The definitions live here; the numbers live there.