By Steve Ranger, 19 January 2006 14:25
NEWS
The Electronic Prescription Service
By 2007, every GP surgery and pharmacy will have access to the Electronic Prescription Service (EPS), allowing GPs to generate electronic prescriptions that will replace paper orders.
Around 1.3 million prescriptions are issued every day in England - a figure growing five per cent every year. Around 70 per cent are repeat prescriptions.
The new system will streamline the existing arrangements and improve accuracy and safety because prescription information will only be typed in once.
EPS will also be integrated with the NHS Care Records Service, recording what has been prescribed and actually dispensed to patients.
Patients with regular prescriptions will be able to nominate a pharmacy to receive the prescription electronically and prepare the patient's medicine in advance.
The project will involve "an enormous logistical challenge", the NHS said, because it will involve upgrading prescribing and dispensing systems, and issuing smart cards.
What progress so far?
The service will be introduced gradually, the first phase of implementation started in February 2005 and the service will be fully operational across England by the end of 2007.
The project is being rolled out in stages - first adding barcodes to paper prescriptions, then adding electronic signatures which can be used to authorise electronic prescriptions.
According to the NHS Connecting for Health business plan, the aim was to have 50 per cent of the National Prescription Service is in place by the end of 2005.
But Connecting for Health told silicon.com: "The target was always going to be a challenging one to meet, especially given its reliance on system supplier and PCT deployment activity."
It said suppliers have worked hard to develop their systems towards compliance with the requirements of the EPS.
"Deployment of release one of the service is now underway and we anticipate that suppliers will make significant progress in deploying their compliant systems in the coming months. We are confident that the over-arching target of 100 per cent of the NPS being delivered by the end of 2007 is achievable."There are currently 140 GP practices operating the service and approximately 400 further GP practices have had their software upgraded in preparation for going live. As of 16 January, more than 250,000 prescriptions have been processed electronically.
Comments
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1. anonymous
Um, interesting. Some points raised differ from what the reality.
Trusts are being pushed into CRS with no reguard to existing functionality or cost of moving to the new system.
Choose and Book is a complete failure, with all rollouts being stopped in our area, and existing users being told that they can stop using the system if they want to.
The N3 rollout success depends on what you mean by connected. BT have a different meaning of that phrase than most.
PACS is in, and working with a few glitches. The project was painfull however.
Setting users up on the Spine is a slow and painfull business, with a lot of resistance from users.
The Contact email system is slow and clumbersom, and not very user friendly.
You have missed of a few major national projects, such as the Electronic Staff Record, Shares Business Service and Integrated Comunity Equipment Services, all heading for their own show stopping problems if we're not carefull.
Overall, a nightmare for NHS IT Staff.
2. anonymous
Haven't seen any evidence of this in use yet.
3. matthew
How do you find out which IT companies are involved in these NHS -IT projects like choose and book? there seems to be problems with payment that is affecting accenture, but i can't find out or see who the other companies affected are - so its hard to judge if its bad NHS management of projects, or poor delivery by the companies that is the problem?
what does everyone else think on this issue?