PJ Online | MM Letters (Why are we not e-prescribing?/Helen Critchlow)

Home

logo

Medicines Management
Issue no 3, p12
May/June 2002

Letters

Why are we not e-prescribing?

From Helen Critchlow

Helen Critchlow MRPharmS is a consultant pharmacist from Bolton Lancashire

In hospitals, 12 per cent of adverse events are related to medicines use. Each event leads to an average of 8.5 additional days in hospital, costing the NHS £500 million each year. Electronic prescribing reduces medicine errors significantly by providing timely, legible information.¹

When we go to the bar to buy a beer, touch screen technology is the norm. If we want to buy our groceries on-line from Tesco, the ordering program is delivered over the internet and can be used with no training. Our bank records are available to us at telling machines worldwide yet we accept illegible scraps of paper for prescriptions and that we will never know definitively the patient's full medical history when we are treating them. The technology and capability to do electronic prescribing are available today, so why are we not using them. Are we afraid of doing anything unless we do everything?

We are now familiar with using hand-held PDAs for personal organisers. These can be fitted with cards that give permanent internet access over the mobile telephone network, and prescribing programs exist to use on them. This would allow us to have access to both the PMR and decision support during prescribing, at any time and in any place.

Hospitals are starting to send electronic discharge summaries to GPs. But what about vice versa? Imagine all GP systems sending structured emails that could be read by us or interpreted by EPR systems to allow other health carers to know the patient's current medication record every time a patient is admitted to hospital or transferred to any other health carer.

Systems exist to have a common view of medication down to preparation level without a centralised coding system. Imagine these being used to transfer medication records between systems, avoiding transcription, and allowing regional or even national reporting of total prescribing across all healthcare sectors.

Why did we not hit the national targets for electronic prescribing this year? And who will suffer because we did not? It is only our lack of imagination that is holding us back.

References

1. A Spoonful of Sugar: medicines management in NHS hospitals. Audit Commission, December 2001.