Mental health chiefs in the West Midlands have chosen an e-prescribing system from Ascribe after winning £500K from a government fund to improve patient safety. Ascribe, part of EMIS Group, will provide its Electronic Prescribing and Medicines Administration (ePMA) system to Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust. It follows an award to the Trust of £500K from the government’s ‘safer hospitals, safer wards’ initiative. The Trust says it chose Ascribe over Rio for the richer clinical functionality and scalability of its ePMA system.
"We are looking forward to working with Ascribe Ltd to support the roll-out of our electronic pharmacy and medicines management system" comments Nigel Barnes, Director of Pharmacy, Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust. "The introduction of ePMA will improve the accuracy and consistency of prescribing, improve the administration of medicines as well as general medicines management throughout the Trust, ultimately improving the quality of service we provide to patients through increasing patient safety and clinical effectiveness."
James Reed, Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist and Chief Clinical Information Officer, Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust commented: "This project will deliver clear benefits for patients in terms of safety and quality of practice. It will help all of our clinical staff to deliver the best care possible through reducing opportunities for errors and allowing easy access to information which until now has been tied up in paper records. This development forms an important step on our journey towards a paperless health record."
Paul Thomson, ePMA lead at Ascribe, commented "One of the detractors for Trusts to move to ePMA is that they are struggling to put together robust business cases. At Ascribe we help Trusts put their business case together with our effective benefits tool; based on our own experience with e-prescribing and published literature, the benefits tool allows trusts to put in the number of wards and number of beds as well as the drugs budget and other factors to create a personalised, compelling set of benefits and savings based upon their own activities."
About Ascribe
Ascribe delivers high quality clinical IT solutions and services to over 70% of the UK’s secondary healthcare providers, and serves customers in Australasia, Malaysia and Hong Kong. Core strengths include Pharmacy and ePrescribing, Electronic Patient Records (including Patient Administration Systems), Unscheduled Care solutions and Mental Health Client Management systems. In addition, Ascribe provides Consultancy expertise in Business Intelligence, Transformation and Integration.
Through integration and interoperability, Ascribe, as a member of EMIS Group, helps clinicians across multiple care settings, share vital information, facilitating better, more efficient healthcare and supporting longer and healthier lives.
Ascribe is a Microsoft Gold Partner and was awarded Health Partner of the Year in 2012 and Microsoft Business Intelligence Finalist in 2014.
About EMIS Group
EMIS Group is the UK leader in connected healthcare software and services. Its solutions are widely used across every major UK healthcare setting from primary and community care, to high street pharmacies, secondary care and specialist services. Through integration and interoperability, EMIS Group helps clinicians share vital information, facilitating better, more efficient healthcare and supporting longer and healthier lives.
EMIS Group serves:
- Primary & Community Care, under the EMIS brand, the UK leader in clinical IT systems for GPs and commissioners. EMIS Group products, including the flagship EMIS Web, hold over 40 million patient records and are used by nearly 6,000 healthcare organisations, including community-based teams. EMIS's patient.co.uk website is the UK's leading independent provider of patient-centric medical and well-being information and related transactional services.
- Community Pharmacy, under the Rx Systems brand, the UK’s single most used integrated community pharmacy and retail system.
- Secondary & Specialist Care, under the Ascribe and Digital Healthcare brands. Ascribe is a leading software provider to 70% of the UK's NHS Acute Trusts and Boards, focused primarily on Hospital Pharmacy, A&E (holding over 30 million patient records), Mental Health and Patient Administration Systems. Digital Healthcare is England’s leading provider of diabetic eye screening and other ophthalmology-related solutions.
© Ascribe 2014. Ascribe is a registered trademark. All other brands and product names and trademarks are the registered property of their respective companies.
About Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust
Our Trust provides a comprehensive mental healthcare service for residents of Birmingham and Solihull, and to communities in the West Midlands and beyond. The Trust operates out of more than 50 sites, serves a culturally and socially diverse population of 1.2 million spread over 172 square miles, has an income of more than £230million and a dedicated workforce of more than 4,000 staff, making it one of the largest and most complex mental health foundation trusts in the country.
The Care Quality Commission rated the Trust ‘Good’ following its first full inspection of our services in May 2014 under its new inspection approach for mental health services.