University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust has gone live with mobile closed-loop electronic prescribing and medicines administration (EPMA) at Leicester General Hospital.
Working with software supplier Nervecentre, the EPMA programme is part of their electronic patient record journey to deliver a mobile first digital patient record system.
The new EPMA module has initially gone live on three renal wards with a wider roll-out planned over the coming months.
Andy Carruthers, Chief Information Officer, said: “The rollout of our brand new e-prescribing module is a really exciting step forward in our EPR journey with Nervecentre. It is great to see it in use out on the wards, and the fact that our teams have made a significant and enthusiastic contribution to the development process is great to see.”
“Key benefits of the new e-prescribing system are the ease of use and enhanced capabilities including barcode scanning from mobile devices, particularly helpful for nursing staff when doing the drugs round and we have had some really positive feedback about this from our teams.”
“From a hospital perspective, building in our prescribing capabilities in to our EPR rather than having a separate system, which is what we have had previously, will really allow us to unlock some of the true EPR benefits, with the single system being greater than the sum of its parts and driving improved quality and safety for our patients.”
Gang Xu, Consultant Nephrologist, said: “It has been a really exciting project for us to be involved in and we’re already seeing the benefits of having access to patient medications, observations and fluid balance information all in one place with a single login.”
The introduction of the system means staff can use mobile devices to scan GS1 barcodes at the bedside, and the EPMA tool incorporates the NHS Dictionary of Medicines and Devices (dm+d) to support information exchanges with prescribing systems in other care settings.
The company said: “The closed-loop approach enables hospitals to generate mandatory information for NHS data sets and audits and to stimulate rich, real-time intelligence on medicines utilisation, optimisation and administration.”
As part of HTN’s Health Tech for the Now series, Andy Carruthers, Chief Information Officer and Graeme Hall, Associate Chief Pharmacist/Chief Pharmacy Information Officer at Leicester’s Hospitals shared their digital strategy:
