Automatic drug utilization reports with R and ggplot2

This program takes a data set of drug utilisation of 4 fictional drugs in 10 fictional hospitals and plots each time-series with a locally weighted regression (Lowess) trend line. It also places an time-series trend of the usage for each drug that is aggregated across all included hospitals. The results are facetted by hospital service, in this case surgical and medical.

The purpose of writing the program was to develop a method to automatically generate antibiotic utilisation reports for individual hospital so that hospital managers could compare usage. The reports could be used as part of antimicrobial stewardship programs at local or system level.

Here is an example of one of the generated reports. It is probably a good idea to run this through R studio as it has a nicely integrated chart viewer.

And here is the code that generated the report.

The data are available here if you want to use them yourself