Clinicians at Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust are prescribing and administering drugs more safely and efficiently thanks to cutting-edge technology from EMIS Health. The Trust has gone live with EMIS Health's ePMA (electronic prescribing and medicines administration) in the 20-bed Scarisbrick mental health unit at Ormskirk Hospital. It's the first phase in a rollout of the technology to 10 sites across the Trust, which provides health and wellbeing services for 1.5 million people in Lancashire. Seven thousand staff provide inpatient and community mental health services, community nursing, health visiting and a range of therapy services.
EMIS Health's ePMA replaces paper records and drug charts with a seamless electronic system that gives clinicians vital medication data at their fingertips at every step of the patient's care in hospital, through to their own GP when they return home. It is integrated with the hospital pharmacy’s stock control system to ensure efficient ordering and fulfilment of discharge prescriptions. Trust staff are delighted with the new system.
"It has been wonderful to see it in use and the first successful drug rounds on the wards," said Amanda Parkinson, lead ePMA pharmacist. "One of the main benefits is that the drug charts are available to several health care professionals at once, meaning that multidisciplinary team meetings can run at the same time as medicines are being administered."
Duane Lawrence, managing director of EMIS Health secondary care said: "Our ePMA is used by Trusts up and down the country. They are seeing clear patient safety and efficiency benefits from replacing paper records and charts with an electronic system. It gives clinicians decision support, legible prescriptions and the ability to safely share medication data with colleagues. ePMA also incorporates a robust audit process, which is vital, particularly in mental health care."
EMIS Health's ePMA provides
- Single click prescribing for complex regimens, with full decision support
- Drug chart views
- Medicines reconciliation, supporting clinical pharmacy screening
- Instant drug supply requests
- Audit and analysis of prescribing trends and patterns
Related news articles:
- EMIS' Profile
About EMIS Health
EMIS Health is part of EMIS Group plc - the UK leader in connected healthcare software and services.
EMIS Health provides software and services to clinicians working across every major UK healthcare setting, including:
- Primary Care - market leader with 54% share of the UK GP market; its systems hold 40 million cradle to grave patient records;
- Community Children's and Mental Health Care - 9% and growing UK market share;
- Secondary Care - 81% of NHS Acute Trusts use an EMIS Health system; its software holds 30 million patient records in A&E alone;
- Community Pharmacy - the single most used integrated community pharmacy and retail system (36% UK market share);
- Specialist Care - EMIS Health is the leading provider of software and services to support diabetic eye screening (82% English market share) and other ophthalmology and specialist services.
EMIS Health is an innovator in secure data-sharing to join up healthcare. It was the first in the UK to enable community pharmacists to access information from the GP patient record - supporting safer dispensing - and the first to integrate personal health data captured on wearable consumer devices with the GP patient record.
Other businesses within EMIS Group are
- Patient - the UK's leading provider of patient-centric medical and well-being information and related transactional services; www.patient.info attracts 18 million unique visitors a month.
- Egton - providing specialist ICT infrastructure, software, hardware and engineering services.
- EMIS Care - the new name for EMIS Group’s most recent acquisition, Medical Imaging, a specialist provider of grading and assessment services to support diabetic eye screening.
About Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust
Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust was established in April 2002 and authorised as a Foundation Trust on 1st December 2007. The Trust provides health and wellbeing services for a population of around 1.5million people. The services provided include community nursing, health visiting and a range of therapy services including physiotherapy, podiatry and speech & language. Wellbeing services provided include smoking cessation and healthy lifestyle services. The Trust specialises in secure, inpatient and community mental health services as well as offender health. Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust covers the whole of the county and employs around 7,000 members of staff across more than 400 sites.
The Trust has launched its Five Year Plan which contains six key elements, shown below, that together, support the organisation to achieve its overall vision of providing 21st century healthcare with wellbeing at its heart.