The client
Community Pharmacy England (known as PSNC until 2023) represents England’s community pharmacies — the body that negotiates funding and keeps the machinery between pharmacies, the Drug Tariff and the NHS running. Prescription pricing accuracy is existential for its members: errors flow straight into pharmacy finances and the NHS budget.
The problem
England dispenses prescriptions at a scale where nobody can check pricing by hand: hundreds of thousands of items, priced against a Drug Tariff that changes constantly. Pharmacies needed a way to find pricing errors systematically — vital to keeping both their own financial stability and NHS resourcing on track.
What EBI built
A custom cloud application that audits and checks the pricing of hundreds of thousands of UK prescriptions simultaneously, using algorithms and calculations tailored specifically to the Drug Tariff’s rules. Data arrives from a public body of the Department of Health and Social Care, is loaded into the application, and pricing exceptions surface for review — so pharmacies can identify errors instead of absorbing them.
EBI’s work ran wider than the audit engine: website support agreements, the Prism reporting work, and service agreements spanning more than a decade with the organisation through its PSNC era.
Why it matters if you’re reading this
This is data engineering with a public outcome: a bespoke system quietly protecting the finances of thousands of community pharmacies — and by extension, NHS money. When the rules are complex, the volumes are huge and off-the-shelf doesn’t exist, this is what gets built.