Data warehousing based architecture for the reporting of the NHS primary care prescribing

Primary Care Prescribing is one of the most complex established NHS therapeutic processes. A wide array of drugs is prescribed on a regular and irregular basis to a large cohort of the population. The prescribing budget funds the costs of drugs prescribed in primary care. Typically a primary care trust overspends its prescribing budgets on drugs with dynamic prescribing patterns and pricing. Furthermore, prescribing patterns are an accurate indicator of the quality of healthcare provided in primary care. In this paper a data warehousing approach is proposed that allows integrating prescribing data from different GP practices, equipped with an adhoc OLAP utility that allows measurement of the local prescribing activity within available resources.