Big Data Comes to the NHS

Friday Lunchtime Lectures at the Open Data Institute. For our second lecture... Big Data Comes to the NHS The NHS has been challenged to make £20 billion in efficiency savings by 2015. £10 billion a year are spent by the NHS on essential drugs. Often, there’s a choice between a cheap generic medication, or an expensive branded one, so reducing prescribing variation is a priority as a painless way to save money. Big Data specialists, Francine Bennett and Bruce Durling from Mastodon C took us on a journey through their work on Prescribing Analytics and showed how they identified £200m potential savings using 40 million rows of open data from the NHS.