From the autumn, the Netherlands Health Institute will publish data on developments in the use of medicines, medical aid instruments and associated costs from its GIPdatabase as open data. On June 23, Open State Foundation requested the reuse of this government information from the GIP database in an open machine readable format.
The data includes medicines and medical aid instruments that are reimbursed by health insurers under the Health Insurance Act (basic health insurance). The Netherlands Health Institute has created two separate CSV files: one for pharmaceutical care and one for medical instruments. The data sets contain volumes and costs of pharmaceutical care and medical aid instruments. The data relate to the years 2011 through 2015.
Pharmaceutical care
For pharmaceutical care, the values are presented at the deepest ATC level (the active substance, as also presented on the GIP database). In the dataset pharmaceutical care one finds the total number of deliveries (declarations / issues); the total delivered standard day dosages; the total remuneration paid by health insurers (under the Health Insurance Act); the total number of unique users and a number of derivative variables, such as the average number of standard daydoses per user (DDD).
For the medical aid instruments, the values are presented at the monitor level. In this dataset, the monitor name (a description of a group of instruments) is used. Here too are the total number of deliveries (declarations); the total costs paid by health insurers (under the Health Insurance Act) and the total number of unique users.
The Netherlands Health Institute is expected to publish these open data sets on the website of the GIP database in the fourth quarter or when possible in the third quarter of this year. If you want to view the data yourself, you can download the datasets already here at data.openstate.eu.