The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 277 No 7423 p485-489
21 October 2006

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Electronic prescribing — experience in the UK and system design issues

In this article, Stephen Goundrey-Smith provides pharmacists with an overview of published experience of electronic prescribing in the UK and discusses the effect of system design on, and issues associated with, the perceived benefits of EP

Stephen Goundrey-Smith, MSc, MRPharmS, is pharmacy informatics specialist at SGS PharmaSolutions, Banbury, Oxfordshire e-mail stephen@goundrey-smith.freeserve.co.uk

SUMMARY

Electronic prescribing (EP) (known in the US as computerised physician order entry) is a key component of the NHS Connecting for Health (CfH) programme. The current delivery target date for secondary care EP, as distinct from electronic transfer of prescriptions in the community (ETP), is 2010. EP has been taking place in a number of hospitals in the US, most notably the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, for some years now and various benefits have been documented. There has also been experience of EP at certain UK centres, in particular the Wirral Hospitals and also Burton-upon-Trent. Nevertheless, despite experience in certain centres of excellence and EP pilots in specific areas in a handful of hospitals, it is likely that EP systems are in general use in a relatively small proportion of hospitals in the UK. A survey of 188 hospitals conducted in the UK in 2000 indicated that, at that time, 89.4 per cent of hospitals surveyed had no EP system, 11 per cent had an EP system but only 2 per cent of hospitals had full electronic prescribing facilities.

In the UK, it is likely that the uptake of EP has been affected by the CfH programme. The likely scenario is that local EP innovation has been slowed down, pending the availability of the full clinical IT solutions from the CfH local service providers. In any case, the difficulties associated with EP implementations due to commercial and organisational factors have been commented on in the literature.

Since EP is now closer to the top of the CfH agenda, it is important that clinical and IT professionals in the NHS have an understanding of the issues associated with it that may arise during local implementations. However, while there are various papers in the literature describing the quantitative benefits of specific EP schemes, and some papers reviewing experience from a US perspective, there are no papers giving a general overview of EP implementation and issues from a UK perspective. This article aims to provide such an overview.

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