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Welcome to your annual practice report
This report has been developed to give you an opportunity to reflect on the treatment received by patients registered
at your practice in the past year. It summarises the medicines dispensed and laboratory tests requested for those patients
between July 2012 and June 2013.
Methods
The data in this report is based on three of the Ministry of Health’s National Collections. The collections used in
this report contain data provided to Sector Services (formerly HealthPAC) and National Collections and Reporting through
the General Transaction Processing System:
- The Pharmaceutical Collection holds claim data submitted by pharmacies for all community dispensings of subsidised
medicines.`
- The Laboratory Claims Collection contains claim data for publicly funded laboratory tests performed in community
laboratories. Laboratory tests performed in hospitals are not included in this collection.
- The Primary Health Organisation Enrolment Collection holds patient enrolment data for 4.27 million patients registered
to 1033 New Zealand general practices.
As our data is provided by the Ministry of Health, bpacnz has no control over errors which may occur at the pharmacy,
laboratory, Sector Services or Ministry of Health. Some errors may also be due to rounding.
In this report, cost is the standard price at which a medicine is supplied to wholesalers, exclusive of GST, dispensing
fees, markup and rebates. Therefore the cost listed is not necessarily the actual cost of this medicine.
Data has been excluded for patients who are not registered to a practice in the PHO Enrolment Collection. Enrolled patients
accounted for 98% of pharmaceutical dispensings and 99% of laboratory investigations recorded in the National Collections.
Therefore data has also been excluded when a National Health Index (NHI) number was not recorded for the patient.
This report includes data on dispensed subsidised medicines. Any medicines prescribed to your patients that were not
dispensed by a community pharmacy, or are unsubsidised, will not appear on this report.
Important Note
Some medicines dispensed and tests performed for your registered patients are likely to have been prescribed, or requested
by New Zealand healthcare professionals who do not work at your practice, and will not necessarily be listed if you audit
your Practice Management System. They are included in this report to provide you with an overall view of the care received
by your registered patients.
Individual prescribing reports
If you would like to review your annual individual prescribing report please log in.
You can then find your report by navigating to Your personalised reports
Changes to the report
Based on feedback we have received in the last year we have modified the report in an attempt to make it more relevant
to prescribers. The main changes are outlined below:
1. Number of medicines and tests reported
Instead of listing dispensing rates for all 755 medicines and all 188 laboratory tests available we have included the
250 most commonly dispensed medicines and the 75 most commonly performed tests. These make up over 90% of all dispensings
and laboratory tests performed in the community in New Zealand.
2. Number of items
Item numbers refer to stat dispensings (entire 3 month supply) and initial dispensings only – these numbers do not include
repeat dispensings, e.g. if a patient is taking a long term medicine and was compliant they should have four initial dispensings
per year for that medicine. This eliminates the ‘over-counting’ of medicines that have more frequent dispensing rates,
e.g. methadone which may be dispensed weekly or daily.
3. Quartiles
To allow you to make comparisons with practices of similar size we have created quartiles. Practices have been assigned
to one of four groups depending on the number of registered patients, as shown below.
|
Number of registered patients |
Number of practices in the quartile |
| Quartile 1 |
1 - 1723 patients |
260 practices |
| Quartile 2 |
1724 – 3100 patients |
257 practices |
| Quartile 3 |
3101 – 5380 patients |
259 practices |
| Quartile 4 |
≥5381 patients |
257 practices |
You will see in the data tables throughout the report that there is a number for your practice, the quartile
you belong to and the national data (all practices grouped together).
4. Cost data
This report includes cost data for the first time (Pages 6 – 7). This is to provide you with a general understanding of
the highest cost medicines used each year in New Zealand and for patients in your practice.
Feedback
As this is the first year we have made these changes – we would like to know how useful you find them. We
would also like to hear if you have any further suggestions for presenting and comparing annual prescribing and
testing data. Email us at: [email protected]