New digital tool to monitor prescribing trends in Ireland is launched

A new digital platform promises to provide real-time insights into prescribing trends in Ireland.

The interactive platform, known as RxTrends, enables healthcare professionals, policymakers and researchers to analyse national prescribing patterns, offering a valuable resource for decision-makers and policy developers.

Created by researchers at the Royal College of Surgeons (RCSI), RxTrends is the first tool of its kind in Ireland, using publicly available data from the HSE’s Primary Care Reimbursement Service (PCRS).

It allows users to visualise and compare prescribing rates and costs for medications and therapeutic groups over time, giving a clearer picture of medicine usage across the country.

“Understanding how medicines are prescribed and how costs evolve over time is crucial for improving healthcare policy and practice,” said Prof Frank Moriarty, associate professor at RCSI’s School of Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences who led on the development of the application.

“RxTrends provides a user-friendly way to analyse prescribing data, which can help us to ensure more efficient use of medicines, to understand how prescribing aligns with national recommendations, how generic medicines can save costs for the health service and the impact of new policies.”

The app was developed by Prof Moriarty and RCSI postdoctoral researcher Dr Ahmed Hassan Ali, and incorporates prescribing and cost data from 2016, covering the 100 most frequently prescribed medicines, and all therapeutic groups. Users can track trends by selecting specific medicines or broader therapeutic categories, making the tool highly flexible and informative.

The tool includes graphs and trend analyses of medication use and costs over time, and the ability to assess the proportion of prescribing for a medication within therapeutic groups.

Users can also use the information available to explore how medication use changes based on seasonal trends or policies like Ireland’s Preferred Drug Initiative and the introduction of generic medicines.

RxTrends researchers emphasise that further improvements could be made with access to more detailed prescribing data.

The app’s development was part of the CDRx project funded by the Health Research Board and developed with collaborators in University College Cork and the HSE. The approach for developing the tool has been documented in a newly published paper detailing its methodology and potential applications.

The tool can be downloaded here.