University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust has shared successes from 2024-25 and next steps for digital in medicines management, focusing on digital system upgrades and improving electronic prescribing uptake.
In March 2025, the trust upgraded to the latest version of its CareFlow Medicine Management software to facilitate eprescribing and pharmacy stock management. While this move “mitigated several risks associated with electronic prescribing and medicines administration (EPMA) and provided benefits for pharmacy contract management”, teams continue to monitor impact and risks.
Uptake and utilisation of outpatient electronic prescribing “remains low”, the trust reports, with 12,500 prescriptions created in the last six months. To tackle this, a link between the outpatient module and the outpatient prescribing module has been created and is entering its final stage of testing and validation.
UHS teams have also supported the ICS EPMA group, working with Isle of Wight NHS Trust in the deployment of its EPMA to maternity services in May 2025. UHS has taken on an EPMA lead role for the OneEPR programme, working to assess process flows for medicines across four acute trusts, and to identify “convergence and transformation opportunities” prior to OneEPR system deployment.
Work continues to rollout ward direct digital ordering of stock medicines, on the development of a new drug savings dashboard for monthly medicines saving reporting, and on upgrading the dispensary pharmacy prescription tracker with new functionality to record delivery to wards. UHS’s digital pharmacy team is also supporting the trust’s wider digital function on enabling an infection viewer app to monitor antibiotic prescribing and administration during admissions.
In other updates, UHS outlines how its homecare service for medicines has evolved, with the number of patients now at over 9,000. The focus is on enabling the electronic transmission of homecare prescriptions to providers, it states, with expectations that “further digital, robotic process automation will need to be explored throughout 25/26 to ensure this service can meet the needs of clinical services”.
Looking ahead, UHS’s plans include developing an automated stock management dashboard, upgrading its EPMA in Q3 2026/27 to meet the new contractual requirement to provide NHS England with secondary care eprescribing data, and delivering a digital fridge monitoring system for wards to reduce stock wastage. A key target for 2025/26 into early 2026/27 includes deploying a digital system for controlled drug recording.
Wider trend: NHS Trust digital transformation
East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust has reviewed its EPR programme, following the implementation of Epic in October 2025, highlighting positive outcomes, learnings, and early service impact. On the approach to go-live, the trust shares that “intensive focus” was placed on application building and testing, wait list validation, work queues, clinic templates, activity stabilisation planning, data migration, cutover planning, and organisational readiness.
A roadmap for delivery of Birmingham Women’s and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust’s latest strategy to 2030 has outlined a series of digital priorities across the next four years, covering post-go-live EPR optimisation, piloting AI, cloud migration, and a device and infrastructure refresh. For 2026-27, aims include publishing a new digital strategy, post-go-live optimisation of Epic EPR, completing a legacy system risk assessment and prioritised replacement plan, piloting AI solutions, redesigning data governance, and developing a pathology and genetics LIMS.
An annual safeguarding report from East and North Hertfordshire Teaching NHS Trust has highlighted the role of digital in adult and children’s safeguarding, including the full digitalisation of s42 and Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards, and the successful launch of a maternity EPR. A bespoke digital risk assessment tool has been developed and deployed by the trust’s safeguarding team in collaboration with a national working group and NHS England safeguarding lead, in unscheduled care settings. According to ENHT, the tool has been audited and returned “excellent” compliance rates along with an increase in recognition of child exploitation, and a 70 percent increase in referrals from 2022.
