Working together for prescribing safer medicines and optimised systems

FDB team at 'e-Prescribing: working together for safe medicines and optimised systems' on 14 May

Caroline Prouse, Product Manager at FDB talks about the recent event: “We recently participated in an e-prescribing and Medicines Optimisation event held by the NHS Futures programme and Tech UK. This event was designed to help NHS teams share learnings and best practice to inform and ultimately speed up their own ePMA implementations. It provided a fascinating opportunity to listen to a range of experiences from teams across acute, mental health and community services who are leading or have been involved in ePMA implementations and to gain an understanding of what is potentially possible.

We were able to hear first-hand about how NHS trusts have adopted e-prescribing, the pitfalls and how to avoid these, and how we should all be working together in closer partnership with vendors to improve the quality of implementations by enhancing clinical engagement.  We also learned about some valuable pieces of research and development by teams across the NHS who are taking forward ‘key areas of need’ identified as part of the Five Year Forward View plans.

FDB presented within a workshop with other members of the InterOpen (www.interopen.org/about-us/) agreement and Tech UK (www.techuk.org). Entitled “How best to work with vendors in partnership” the workshop was a fantastic opportunity to find out more from NHS trusts about how to work together when implementing a system, in order to inform patient safety and improve patient outcomes. The energy in the room was great and we had some informative, constructive, open dialogue and feedback from users and vendor partners in the room. The overall take home message from the session seemed to be that vendors need to look at both core and wider stakeholder relations and that a roadmap needs to be built with the vendor so that the solution can be incrementally developed beyond day one of the roll out. 

There were a range of workshops during the day from various NHS Trusts and vendor partners which highlighted some of the exciting developments happening today.  Many delegates were able to quiz speakers and follow up on areas of interest via the NHS Futures forum.

We heard from Ann Slee, Associate Clinical Chief Information Officer (Medicines) of NHS England who talked about her recent research into the variation of quality of implementations of e-prescribing and the importance of journey roadmaps. All of which pointed to the importance of clinical engagement and partnership during the process.

Simon Eccles, Chief Clinical Information Officer for Health and Care spoke about the need for joined up healthcare between secondary care and CCGs and how the sharing of data could be a significant step change in patient care.

This was a really insightful day, and it was amazing to have a forum to share and learn from others with a huge range of knowledge.”