OpenPrescribing

OpenPrescribing.net is an open-data service built and operated by the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science at the University of Oxford. It turns the English Prescribing Dataset published monthly by the NHS Business Services Authority into public dashboards, prescribing-safety measures, and a free RESTful API covering primary-care GP prescribing across England. The API exposes spending, quantity and item counts by BNF code and by NHS organisation (practice, PCN, Sub-ICB Location, ICB, Regional Team), standardised prescribing measures, drug-tariff and price-per-unit data, and organisation reference/boundary lookups, all returned as JSON, CSV or GeoJSON. Home market is the United Kingdom (England prescribing data). It is an independent academic analytics platform layered on NHS open data, not an NHS FHIR clinical system; there is no OAuth, no SMART-on-FHIR, and currently no registration or API key is required.

OpenPrescribing publishes 5 API contracts indexed on the APIs.io network, including Measures API, Reference API, Spending API, and 2 more. Tagged areas include Healthcare, United Kingdom, NHS, Prescribing, and Pharmacy.

The OpenPrescribing catalog on APIs.io includes 1 Spectral governance ruleset.

OpenPrescribing’s developer surface includes documentation, API reference, support, engineering blog, getting-started guide, authentication, and 21 more developer resources.

🌐 Visit website 📡 Profile data on GitHub

32.4/100 thin ▬ flat Agent 23/100 agent aware Front door AI 1/6 silent Heartbeat 95/100 alive self hosted · MIT Full breakdown ↓
scored 2026-11-06 · rubric v0.27.0 · Show this score on your site →

AccessOpen

1 published contract 2 Agent Skills

Healthcare United Kingdom NHS Prescribing Pharmacy Open Data Primary Care Public Health Analytics

Kin Score

Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-11-06 · rubric v0.27.0

Composite quality — 32.4/100 · thin

Contract Quality 8.6 / 19

Developer Ergonomics 8.8 / 15

Access Clarity 0.0 / 15

Operational Transparency 0.3 / 10

Contract Governance 1.6 / 9

Discoverability 5.5 / 8

Regulatory Posture 2.0 / 15

Open Source Surface 2.5 / 10

Agent readiness — 23/100 · agent aware

Machine-Readable Contract 18 / 18

Agentic Access Contract 10 / 10

Documented Reversibility 6 / 6

MCP Server 0 / 12

Machine-Readable Auth 10 / 10

Idempotency 9 / 9

Stable Error Semantics 8 / 8

Request/Response Examples 0 / 7

Rate-Limit Signaling 0 / 7

Typed Event Surface 0 / 6

Agent Skills 5 / 5

Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4

Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3

A2A Agent Card 0 / 8

Dry-Run / Simulate Mode 4 / 4

Delegated User Identity 0 / 6

Protected Resource Metadata 0 / 5

Registration Without a Human 0 / 6

Agentic Commerce Well-Known Document 0 / 5

Pagination 0 / 5

Distinct Operations 3 / 3

MCP Tool Quality 6 / 6

Regulatory Posture applies to this provider. Its tags matched the Health regime, so Regulatory Posture carries 15 points of the composite. If this regime is wrong for your business, say so on your provider repo — the applicability map is public and we will correct it.

Open Source Surface applies to this provider. This product is open source and we read its repository directly, so Open Source Surface carries 10 points of the composite. It is scored from what the repository actually publishes — a security policy, a contribution guide, a release history, a code of conduct — read live from the provider rather than inferred from our own catalog pointers. This facet adds; nothing was taken away to make room for it. An open-source project is not excused from the commercial facets, because exemption would strip it of the points it does earn. If we have the wrong repository, or this product is not open source, say so on your provider repo and we will drop the facet rather than have you publish against it.

Create-or-Update Ergonomics does not apply to this provider. The published contracts declare no write operations, and a read-only API cannot create-or-update. The facet is excluded from this provider's denominator entirely — not scored zero. A reference or data API is not deficient for being unable to upsert.

The six quality facets above are damped to 75 points between them, because both conditional facets apply and carry 25 points together. That is why each facet's contribution is shown against a damped maximum: raising a quality facet moves the composite by 75% of its nominal weight, not 100%. The full arithmetic is at apis.io/rating/.

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Agent readiness — checks not met, largest first (exact, from this profile):

MCP Server +12 pts — deployment.mode + probe verdict on the mcp/ manifest, not the pointer; an unprobed slug falls back to authorship
A2A Agent Card +8 pts — a2a/-a2a.yml manifest, graded on conformance.grade against A2A 1.0.0
Rate-Limit Signaling +7 pts — OpenAPI responses document X-RateLimit-* / RateLimit headers (verified), else a rate_limits artifact or RateLimits link (documented)
Request/Response Examples +7 pts — share of operations carrying request/response examples; else an Examples / Code Samples link
Registration Without a Human +6 pts — a `registration_endpoint` in the served RFC 8414 / OIDC discovery document
Delegated User Identity +6 pts — a served discovery document listing authorization_code in grant_types_supported (served), else an oauth2 authorizationCode flow or openIdConnect declared in an OpenAPI (documented)

6 more unmet checks in the Agent Readiness table above.

Kin Score — facets with the most composite points still available (weight × headroom):

Access Clarity scores 0.0 — up to +20.0 composite points
Contract Quality scores 45.6 — up to +13.6 composite points
Operational Transparency scores 2.6 — up to +12.7 composite points

Each check links to what satisfies it. Publish the artifact, or tell us where it already lives, and the score moves on the next scoring run.

Improve this rating by publishing the missing artifacts — every area above can be raised, and the full rubric is at apis.io/rating/. Every facet and dimension name above is a link: it opens that measurement's own page — what it means, the exact checks that feed it, how the whole catalog distributes on it, and the providers at the top of it. This rating is computed from the provider profile at artifacts.apis.io/openprescribing/apis.yml: open an issue on github.com/api-evangelist/openprescribing to ask a question or point us at an artifact you publish. Submit an artifact on GitHub — free → Manage your own listing — the Influence plan, $499/mo →

Standards implemented 1

Standards this provider implements or carries. De facto ones are profiled and measured by the API Commons; formal ones come from the standards directory and are linked by the provider's own tags. The evidence column says how each claim was established — not that it was made.

OpenAPI

measured — observed by APIs.io (published)

APIs 5

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

OpenPrescribing Information API

Reference-data lookups for the prescribing dataset — search BNF sections, chemicals and presentations by name or code; look up NHS organisations (Sub-ICB Location or practice) b...

OpenPrescribing Measures API

Standardised NHS prescribing-quality and safety measures (numerators, denominators and calculated values) at national, Regional Team, ICB, Sub-ICB Location, PCN and practice lev...

OpenPrescribing Reference API

BNF code, organisation code and organisation-location reference lookups.

OpenPrescribing Spending API

Retrieve total prescribing spending, quantity and items across the last five years of the English Prescribing Dataset — by BNF code (section, chemical or presentation) and by NH...

OpenPrescribing Tariff API

Drug-tariff prices and price-per-unit / ghost-generic savings data.

Open Collections 1

Open, tool-agnostic API collections (OpenAPI-derived and Bruno).

OpenPrescribing API

OPEN COLLECTION

Agent Skills 2

Packaged agent skills for driving this provider's APIs from an AI assistant.

Analyse prescribing spending for a drug

AGENT SKILL

Compare prescribing-quality measures across organisations

AGENT SKILL

Spectral Rules 1

Spectral governance rulesets for linting and validating these APIs.

OpenPrescribing API Rules

52 rules · 50 errors 1 warnings 1 info

SPECTRAL

OpenAPI Overlays 1

Overlays applied on top of this provider's contracts. Each card says who wrote it: a document the provider publishes, or one API Evangelist derived or generated.

Openprescribing Openapi Overlay

3 actions · update · openprescribing-openapi.yml

DERIVED

Security Posture 2

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

Openprescribing Authentication

none · 0 schemes

SECURITY

Openprescribing Domain Security

TLSv1.3 · DMARC

SECURITY

Agentic Access 1

Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.

Openprescribing Agentic Access

19 operations

19 operations · 0 acting

AGENTIC

Resources

Get Started 2

Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call

DeveloperPortal

DeveloperPortal

GettingStarted

GettingStarted

Documentation 4

Reference material describing how the API behaves

ContributionGuide

Documentation

APIReference

OpenAPI

Agent Surfaces 5

MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs

AgenticAccess

AgenticAccess

WellKnown

WellKnown

X-MCPServerCandidate

X-MCPServerCandidate

LLMsTxt

LLMsTxt

AgentSkill

AgentSkill

Design & Contract 5

Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events

Conventions

ErrorCatalog

DataModel

Lifecycle

Conformance

Build 2

SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with

GitHubOrganization

GitHubOrganization

SourceCode

SourceCode

Access & Security 2

Authentication, authorization, and security posture

DomainSecurity

DomainSecurity

Authentication

Authentication

Operate 2

Status, limits, changes, and where to get help

IssueTracker

IssueTracker

Support

Support

Commercial 1

Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use

License

License

Company 3

The organization behind the API

Website

Website

About

About

Blog

Blog

Other 1

Properties that don't map to a standard resource type

Overlay

Overlay

Source (apis.yml)

aid: openprescribing
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/openprescribing/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
name: OpenPrescribing
kind: company
description: OpenPrescribing.net is an open-data service built and operated by the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science
  at the University of Oxford. It turns the English Prescribing Dataset published monthly by the NHS Business Services Authority
  into public dashboards, prescribing-safety measures, and a free RESTful API covering primary-care GP prescribing across
  England. The API exposes spending, quantity and item counts by BNF code and by NHS organisation (practice, PCN, Sub-ICB
  Location, ICB, Regional Team), standardised prescribing measures, drug-tariff and price-per-unit data, and organisation
  reference/boundary lookups, all returned as JSON, CSV or GeoJSON. Home market is the United Kingdom (England prescribing
  data). It is an independent academic analytics platform layered on NHS open data, not an NHS FHIR clinical system; there
  is no OAuth, no SMART-on-FHIR, and currently no registration or API key is required.
deliveryModel:
  model: self-hosted
  license: MIT
  open_source: true
  commercial: false
  callable_host: true
  label: Self-hosted open source · you run it yourself
  confidence: high
  source:
  - license
  - openapi
  generated: '2026-08-28'
  method: derived
accessModel:
  pricing: unknown
  onboarding: open
  trial: false
  try_now: false
  public: true
  gated: none
  gated_source:
  - onboarding
  label: Open access
  confidence: low
  source:
  - authentication
  - security
  generated: '2026-11-06'
  method: derived
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/apis-json-logo.jpg
tags:
- Healthcare
- United Kingdom
- NHS
- Prescribing
- Pharmacy
- Open Data
- Primary Care
- Public Health
- Analytics
created: '2026-07-24'
modified: '2026-09-16'
specificationVersion: '0.23'
apis:
- aid: openprescribing:openprescribing-information-api
  name: OpenPrescribing Information API
  description: Reference-data lookups for the prescribing dataset — search BNF sections, chemicals and presentations by name
    or code; look up NHS organisations (Sub-ICB Location or practice) by code or name; retrieve list size and ASTRO-PU details;
    and fetch Sub-ICB Location boundaries or approximate practice locations as GeoJSON.
  humanURL: https://openprescribing.net/api/
  baseURL: https://openprescribing.net/api/1.0
  tags:
  - Reference Data
  - BNF
  - Organisations
  properties:
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://openprescribing.net/api/
  - type: APIReference
    url: https://openprescribing.net/api/
- aid: openprescribing:openprescribing-measures-api
  name: OpenPrescribing Measures API
  description: Standardised NHS prescribing-quality and safety measures (numerators, denominators and calculated values) at
    national, Regional Team, ICB, Sub-ICB Location, PCN and practice level. These endpoints power the OpenPrescribing measure
    dashboards and are served under the public /api/1.0/ surface; they are not featured on the main /api/ documentation page.
    Returns JSON or CSV.
  humanURL: https://openprescribing.net/api/
  baseURL: https://openprescribing.net/api/1.0
  tags:
  - Measures
  - Prescribing
  - Public Health
  properties:
  - type: OpenAPI
    url: openapi/openprescribing-measures-api-openapi.yml
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://openprescribing.net/api/
  - type: APIReference
    url: https://openprescribing.net/measure/
- aid: openprescribing:openprescribing-reference-api
  name: OpenPrescribing Reference API
  description: BNF code, organisation code and organisation-location reference lookups.
  humanURL: https://openprescribing.net/api/
  baseURL: https://openprescribing.net/api/1.0
  tags:
  - Reference
  properties:
  - type: OpenAPI
    url: openapi/openprescribing-reference-api-openapi.yml
- aid: openprescribing:openprescribing-spending-api
  name: OpenPrescribing Spending API
  description: Retrieve total prescribing spending, quantity and items across the last five years of the English Prescribing
    Dataset — by BNF code (section, chemical or presentation) and by NHS organisation (practice, PCN, Sub-ICB Location, ICB,
    Regional Team), plus drug-tariff, price-per-unit, ghost-generic and bubble-chart data. Returns JSON or CSV.
  humanURL: https://openprescribing.net/api/
  baseURL: https://openprescribing.net/api/1.0
  tags:
  - Spending
  - Prescribing
  - Pharmacy
  properties:
  - type: OpenAPI
    url: openapi/openprescribing-spending-api-openapi.yml
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://openprescribing.net/api/
  - type: APIReference
    url: https://openprescribing.net/api/
- aid: openprescribing:openprescribing-tariff-api
  name: OpenPrescribing Tariff API
  description: Drug-tariff prices and price-per-unit / ghost-generic savings data.
  humanURL: https://openprescribing.net/api/
  baseURL: https://openprescribing.net/api/1.0
  tags:
  - Tariffs
  tags_raw:
  - Tariff
  properties:
  - type: OpenAPI
    url: openapi/openprescribing-tariff-api-openapi.yml
common:
- type: IssueTracker
  url: https://github.com/bennettoxford/openprescribing/issues
- type: ContributionGuide
  url: https://github.com/bennettoxford/openprescribing/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md
- type: License
  name: MIT
  url: https://github.com/bennettoxford/openprescribing/blob/main/LICENSE
- type: AgenticAccess
  url: agentic-access/openprescribing-agentic-access.yml
- type: DomainSecurity
  url: security/openprescribing-domain-security.yml
- type: Website
  url: https://openprescribing.net/
- type: DeveloperPortal
  url: https://openprescribing.net/api/
- type: Documentation
  url: https://openprescribing.net/api/
- type: APIReference
  url: https://openprescribing.net/api/
- type: About
  url: https://openprescribing.net/about/
- type: Support
  url: https://openprescribing.net/faq/
- type: GitHubOrganization
  url: https://github.com/bennettoxford
- type: SourceCode
  url: https://github.com/bennettoxford/openprescribing
- type: Blog
  url: https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/openprescribing/blog/
- type: GettingStarted
  url: https://openprescribing.net/api/
- type: OpenAPI
  url: openapi/_original/openprescribing-openapi.yml
- type: Authentication
  url: authentication/openprescribing-authentication.yml
- type: Conventions
  url: conventions/openprescribing-conventions.yml
- type: ErrorCatalog
  url: errors/openprescribing-problem-types.yml
- type: DataModel
  url: data-model/openprescribing-data-model.yml
- type: Lifecycle
  url: lifecycle/openprescribing-lifecycle.yml
- type: Conformance
  url: conformance/openprescribing-conformance.yml
- type: WellKnown
  url: well-known/openprescribing-well-known.yml
- type: X-MCPServerCandidate
  url: mcp/openprescribing-mcp.yml
  note: 'Renamed from MCPServer 2026-09-03 (roadmap#247): the manifest self-describes as status: candidate — a tool list derived
    from the published API contracts, not an existing server. The scorer already read the manifest and reported mcp_server
    correctly; the MCPServer type was crediting the artifact-type surfaces with a server that does not exist.'
- type: LLMsTxt
  url: llms/openprescribing-llms.txt
- type: Overlay
  url: overlays/openprescribing-openapi-overlay.yaml
- type: AgentSkill
  url: skills/_index.yml
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com

OpenPrescribing API — frequently asked questions

Does OpenPrescribing have an API?

Yes. APIs.io lists 5 APIs from OpenPrescribing, including OpenPrescribing Information API, OpenPrescribing Measures API and OpenPrescribing Reference API, and 2 more.

Is there an OpenAPI specification for the OpenPrescribing API?

Yes. APIs.io indexes 4 OpenAPI specifications for OpenPrescribing, each linked for download from this page.

How do I authenticate with the OpenPrescribing API?

OpenPrescribing uses bearer-token authentication (none · 0 schemes). The details are profiled on APIs.io as Openprescribing Authentication.

Is the OpenPrescribing API ready for AI agents?

OpenPrescribing has a Kin Score of 32.4 out of 100 (thin) and an Agent Readiness score of 22.9 (agent-aware), scored by API Evangelist on 2026-11-06.

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