Overview
The opencodecounts Shiny app is an interactive tool for
exploring clinical code usage data in England. It visualises trends over
time and helps you search, filter, and analyse clinical codes from three
major coding systems used in the NHS. It can be launched locally with
the run_app() function or accessed online at https://bennettoxford.github.io/opencodecounts/articles/app.
Step 1: Select data
The Shiny app has a sidebar to select one of the available datasets (i.e., SNOMED CT, ICD-10, or OPCS-4) and search for a specific code or a collection of codes, including codelists from OpenCodelists.org.
Figure 1. Select dataset for anlysis.
Step 2: Select codes
The app offers flexible ways to select codes for analysis:
- Search by code: If you know exact codes, start typing and select from suggestions
- Enter keywords to find codes (use
|to combine terms, e.g.,diabetes|diabetic) - Load codelist by URL from OpenCodelists.org.
Figure 2. Search codes by specific code or description.
Figure 3. Select codes by loading codelist.
Step 3: Review your results
There are three main tabs to review the results:
Trends over time: You can explore visualisations summarising overall trends and inspect individual code usage over time. You can hover over data points for detailed information. Toggle “Show individual codes” to see separate lines for each code (available when ≤500 codes selected).
Figure 4. Main page showing Trends over time.
Usage table: A table provides key statistics on the frequency and proportional contribution of selected codes across all years.
Figure 5. Main page showing Usage table.
Selected codes: Additionally, the app presents a structured list of all selected codes along with their descriptions and a column specifiying if usage data was reported. This list can be downloaded as a CSV file for use in EHR research or for upload to OpenCodelists.org.
Figure 6. Main page showing Selected codes.
