E-PRESCRIBING
John Thornbury, director of ICT at Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, speaks to NHE about its new integrated e-prescribing system.
orcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust is the latest to switch to an e-prescribing facility, as the health service gradually leaves paper behind.
W
The switch should boost effi ciency, but also patient safety, the audit trail, and free up clinicians’ time for more important tasks.
The new system is designed to be integrat- ed with the trust’s existing patient admin- istration system, and will be going live over the next year.
John Thornbury, director of ICT at the trust, told NHE: “It’s the fi rst step on a long journey and clearly it’s not without signifi cance. The demand for this has come from the clinicians – my user-base – and it will support patient safety.
“We’re going to be building this in as a team effort, and we’re intending to use it to reduce contraindications, and to reduce the administrative burden as well.
“For example, if you’re prescribing gen- tamicin and you haven’t had a gentamicin assay undertaken, it will automatically or- der one for you at the same time. It mini- mises potential risks.
“That’s just one example, there are lots of similar ones; for example, if you’re check- ing a potassium level, and prescribing a particular drug, on a lot of systems you have to go and check the potassium level – but this will bring the result in for you, so you don’t have to go searching for it.”
66 | national health executive Nov/Dec 11 Control
The system also allows control over the lev- els of medication that different individuals can prescribe.
Thornbury continued: “What we want to do is put information at the fi ngertips of the clinicians, to help them make their de- cisions or review things they have to review without having to go and look elsewhere.
“A lot of that has to be clinically led, be- cause we don’t want to over-burden the clinicians with lots of information, but in- stead give them the critical pieces of infor- mation they need to make their lives easier – and that then supports patient safety.”
Ease-of-use was a key factor in choosing the Galileo system, provided by Italian- German group NoemaLife, Thornbury said. It has to be, since the trust, which operates across three sites, provides hos- pital services to over 550,000 people and employs over 5,000 staff.
Prescribing has previously been done man- ually, although the trust already used the OneView patient administration system provided by Oasis Medical Solutions. The two systems are being fully integrated.
Thornbury explained: “Clearly there will be training, but we’re trying to make it as easy as possible. With all the latest systems, one of the key things is making it as easy as pos- sible to use. You don’t get training to use Amazon or eBay – it’s about the minimum
training possible, and being as intuitive and easy-to-use as possible.”
Digital takeover
“We’re already working with a different company, Xerox, to digitise the patient record,” Thornbury continued. “E-pre- scribing is part of a wider transformation process.
“We’ll also have a single portal that will de- liver all the information the clinicians want at a single point, to include the digitised paper record.
“The whole point is to improve produc- tivity and effi ciency of clinical staff. We intend to deliver cost savings, that’s part of the plans to deliver the £20bn savings that the NHS needs to make. It’s improving productivity, and gives us more fl exibility, so you can start delivering care closer to home, which is particularly important in a rural community.
“It gets rid of the issue of having to trans- port reams of paper notes across the coun- ty to run a clinic out in a GP practice, for example. With the digitisation, that can be done very easily, supporting sustainability as well, while also making it easier for the patients – instead of them having to come to a large acute hospital, trying to fi nd parking and so on, a clinic closer to where they live makes more sense for everybody.”
TELL US WHAT YOU THINK
opinion@nationalhealthexecutive.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100