UK hospital first of kind with ePrescribing solution
Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, a London-based pediatric care NHS Trust, is the first hospital of its kind to implement enterprise-wide electronic prescribing and medicines administration IT supplied by vendor JAC.
All inpatient wards at the trust outside of intensive care are currently running the live EPMA solution.
Improvements to patient safety and a reduction in incidence and severity of drug-related errors prompted the initiative to install the e-prescirbing solution
The system incorporates the Multilex Drug Data File from First DataBank Europe. This data gives patient-specific clinical decision support to providers and can actively check for drug-drug interactions. The system also identifies duplicate therapies, drug allergies and dose checking.
"The paper-based prescribing process has many points of weakness which an electronic medication record can instantly address such as illegible handwriting or missing patient/drug information both of which can have serious consequences," said Christine Booth, a senior pharmacist at GOSH. "Implementation of JAC's EPMA system has already shown to deliver early benefits in medication safety. However, there is scope for future benefits as the software develops to support complex prescribing and administration."