8. Health and Public Spending (Government, Citizens)

Prescribing Analytics shows how government officials and independent professionals can work together to find ways to save public money. It is a data analysis tool about British government expenditure on a specific group of drugs called statins. This drug helps to combat high cholesterol in patients with health problems.

The service was created by a group of independent developers and physicians who work in the UK's public sector. The British health system was given the task of saving 20 billion pounds by 2015, being that half of this is spent on medications. One of the substances most prescribed by physicians in the UK's public health system is statins. The tool accesses the open database of physicians’ prescriptions in the country and analyzes which types of statins were prescribed by physicians in the public system: more expensive variants or usually cheaper "generics."

The data showed that between September 2011 and May 2012, the British government could have saved 22.96 million pounds per month if the physicians had prescribed generic statins that have the same efficacy as the more expensive ones.