The board of South West Yorkshire Partnership Teaching NHS Foundation Trust has highlighted work on digital medicines, digital systems, and AVT, along with its role leading regional EPR procurement.
The migration of SystmOne Community Services into the Integrated Neighbourhood Teams Service Unit has been completed, the trust shares, and SystmOne and ePMA have been successfully adopted at Cheswold Park Hospital. The board further reports being tasked with leading a regional EPR procurement collaborative across West and South Yorkshire.
The Bridgit app has been rolled out to support bedside observations, electronic prescribing has been implemented in mental health community services, and the Patient Knows Best portal is continuing to be developed. South West Yorkshire moves on to outlines plans to deploy Lexacom’s AVT solution to a small number of early adopter services following final governance approval, having already completed clinical safety testing.
On its medicines optimisation and pharmacy framework for 2026-31, the board commits to making pharmaceutical care safer, more equitable, digitally enabled, and fully integrated across the system. It aims that ePMA and electronic transfer of prescriptions to community pharmacy will support safer care and improve outcomes, allowing clinicians to spend more time on face-to-face interactions with patients. “It will also allow us to access data previously unavailable and enable us to use a data driven approach to addressing health inequalities, targeting diverse or deprived populations,” it adds.
Setting a target date of 2027/28, the trust points to ambitions to maximise the use of electronic systems through interoperability, as well as templates, tasks, and so on, to standardise activities and streamline workflows. Over the same time period, it plans for the delivery of electronic prescribing and prescription transmission for community teams and outpatients.
By 2028, the ambition is to investigate the potential uses of AI for medicines information queries. To the strategy end date in 2031, the board also sets out ongoing work around reviewing digital options for ordering, automation, and bar codes; and assessing whether digital solutions could help streamline stock management and enhance efficiency.
Wider trend: Digital medicines
NHS England has opened a secondary care medicines data pre-market engagement, with high level objectives around achieving a reporting function on stock and daily issuance of medicines in secondary care, and a price comparison tool. With a total value of £6.75 million, the preliminary market engagement notice shares details of plans to secure capability and related tooling for the processing of data from hospital pharmacy systems, along with associated licensing and implementation support.
An EPR tool offering a calculator and clinical decision support for safer medicines management has launched at Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust. The Anticholinergic Medication Index (ACMI) tool aims to support prescribers and pharmacists assess patient anticholinergic burden in patients aged 65 and over in inpatient and day case settings. Integrated directly into the EPR, the trust shares that the tool has the capability to automatically update ACMI scores when an anticholinergic medication is prescribed or changed, using a scoring system based on 88 “commonly prescribed” medicines.
The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency has announced plans to launch a regulatory AI sandbox with the aim to explore how artificial intelligence can support medicines development and safety. The sandbox, funded by the Regulatory Innovation Office, will enable AI tools to be tested that have the potential to predict how medicines will be absorbed, processed, or whether they may cause harm. The sandbox will also be used to inform the MHRA about the reliability of whether AI tools can support in deciding the safety of new medicines.
