St Andrew’s rolls-out electronic prescribing

To ensure St Andrew’s provides world-class care to our patients, we are embracing technology to improve quality and safety. We’re pleased to share that this month our new electronic prescribing and medicines administration (ePMA) programme completes the roll out plan for the vast majority of wards across the entire charity.

The software, from EMIS Health, has replaced medicine cards with a robust online system. The core system was already in use by our pharmacy, but our doctors are also now able to use the ‘live’ system to create prescriptions that are sent electronically, with nurses using the system to record what is administered to patients and when. This efficient system allows prescription changes, administration records and supply of medication to be observed in real time, as all users have access to one central electronic record.

Kavi Gohil, Senior Pharmacist and ePMA Lead, explained: “Electronic prescribing ensures prescriptions are clinically checked by pharmacists in an efficient manner, enabling medication to be supplied to the ward without any unnecessary delay. Being able to view the medication charts remotely is paramount to improving safety and efficiency, as any queries can be managed by Pharmacy in shorter time periods, ensuring formulary based prescribing is adhered to as much as possible.”

Tracey O’Brien, ePMA Nurse Trainer and Deployment Support Lead, explained the benefits of the new system: “It ensures that our patients have the correct medication for their needs, in a timely and efficient way – which is ultimately helping to improve patient safety and our quality of care. The system ensures that we’re optimising the use of medicines and supporting patients and prescribing them with the least amount of medication possible.”

Liz Hodgson, Head of Pharmacy, added: “The roll-out of the system is a great achievement. Errors with medication are thankfully rare – but this system means we can reduce them further and improve our service to the patients we look after. ePMA also makes the whole medication process more efficient, which is great news both for pharmacy and our wards.”

EMIS Health provide a variety of healthcare software and services. Ian Bennett, Product Manager for Medicines Management, commented: “The project team at St Andrew’s have been a pleasure to work with. Their meticulous planning ahead of the implementation has seen them roll out EMIS Health ePMA smoothly and without incident across multiple sites. They have also pioneered specialist functionality for Mental Health Act alerting and dose range checking to deliver clinically safer prescribing and administration across all clinical areas.”

For more information on the software, please visit the EMIS Health website.