The pharmacy and IT teams at Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS FT have developed an interface between two systems to improve its discharge process and reduce the length of time patients are waiting to be discharged.
Through an integration between the trust’s EPR (electronic patient record) system called WebV, and its electronic prescribing and medicines administration (ePMA) system, it now provides a patient’s medication list from the ePMA system directly into the EPR. The trust notes that this is saving “approximately 20 minutes per patient being discharged”, rather than their team looking the information up manually and then typing the medication into the EPR.
Last year the interface went live at Scunthorpe and Goole hospitals, with the interface planned to go live at Grimsby hospital in September.
Paulash Haider, Assistant Chief Pharmacist, said: “Introducing ePMA has already reduced the number of medication errors at the trust. By taking advantage of the accuracy provided, having this ability to pass this across to the WebV discharge summary gives us the assurance that GPs will get more accurate information and will also mean the list of medication on the discharge summaries will no longer require corrections and multiple amendments. By working with our colleagues in IT and WebV, we have been able to create a more streamlined process to benefit patients, doctors and GPs.”
Doctor Eman Hasan, added: “ePMA is such a practical way of seeing the complete medications list for patients, allergy statuses, doses, timings, whether it has been given and if not the reason why. Having this at a moment’s notice makes our ward rounds so much easier. It also saves us having to decipher any illegible writing on paper prescription charts too.
“Thanks to the integration with WebV it’s now easy and straightforward to do discharges. Instead of copying medications one by one, you can easily select all the medications from the patient’s ePMA file and mark these to be continued. This was a huge undertaking especially when patients have a big prescription list! I really like how the joint interface displays changes that have been made to medications during admission, for example if they have been discontinued. I find it very practical to use and allows for clearer communication and a much safer handover of care back to the community.”
