BRIT Care pathway
The BRIT project aims to develop and implement at scale the infrastructure for collecting and analysing data on prescribing, clinical interventions and patient demographics in order to better understand the public drivers for antibiotic prescribing in the UK. The project team has developed and tested simple interventions to refine antibiotic prescribing in locations, facilities or sub-groups (of patients and/or clinicians).
A web-based platform (dashboard) has been designed to help users develop a better understanding of how antibiotics are currently prescribed and where prescribing can be improved. The dashboard has two types of users, i.e. Practice level users and CCG level users or policy makers. Features of the dashboard include benchmarking, so a practice can see their prescribing rates adjusted by STAR-PU, and compare to a regional average / national average. There is also information on the variability of prescribing across practices for each infectious condition, where users can see what antibiotic drugs are being prescribed for each condition. Practices will also be informed which of these antibiotic prescriptions are deviating from the guidelines with links to local prescribing recommendations. In addition, risk profiling where a patient’s risk of an infection related complication can be identified in a 30-day window. Over-prescribing to low-risk patients or under prescribing to high-risk patients can also be visualised.
The web-based platform has been designed to incorporate pertinent issues facing clinicians in Primary Care and can be tailored according to the user’s requirements. For example, to explore drivers of antibiotic prescribing, complex models are fitted to national and local data to understand the factors that influence suboptimal prescribing.