ETP to be developed as part of the new NHS integrated care records service
Procurement strategy on ETP is still to be decided |
Electronic transmission of prescriptions (ETP) will be included in England in the integrated care records service (ICRS), the Department of Health said this week.
A statement from the National Programme for Information Technology said: “During
the development of the emerging ETP strategy, it was agreed that elements
of ETP functionality would be best included within the parameters of
ICRS. The procurement strategy for the remaining elements of the ETP
programme will be decided in due course.”
The ICRS will eventually bring together all patient records (eg, from
primary care and hospital) in one electronic form.
The announcement follows a question raised in the House of Lords about
ETP. In response, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health,
Lord Warner, said: “The ETP pilots have been closed as they have
served their purpose to test the feasibility of ETP. An independent evaluation
of the pilots has been completed and received by the Department of Health.
Because of this, limited work has been done to model potential costs
for their continuation.”
Lord Warner said that the main cost would be processing electronic prescriptions
at the Prescription Pricing Authority. “Assuming prescription volume
did not exceed 10,000 items per month, and there was no increase in the
functionality or scope, the PPA estimates its costs at around £230,000
per annum. This figure does not include the cost of connecting the participating
pharmacies to the NHSnet.” These costs are based on a continuation
of the pilot and cannot be compared with the cost of the current paper
system, the DoH confirmed. The PPA has processed 55,947 electronic prescriptions
since the start of the ETP pilots, for approximately 13,500 patients.
Meanwhile, research conducted on behalf of TransScript, one of the three
ETP pilot consortia, found that patients were happy with ETP. All said
ETP had saved them time in terms of collecting their prescriptions from
the surgery and several highlighted its benefit for less mobile patients. |
