UK children's hospital to deploy JAC e-prescribing solution

Tuesday 29th March 2011

JAC, the UK's leading medicine management systems specialist, has won a contract with Alder Hey Children's NHS Foundation Trust to undertake a trust-wide roll out of its Electronic Prescribing and Medicines Administration (EPMA) system.
 
As one of Europe's biggest children's hospitals, Alder Hey provides care for over 200,000 children each year, and the Trust's services are present in more than 40 community outreach sites and programmes. The new EPMA system will help staff ensure the quality and accuracy of prescribing and eliminate drug transcription errors, as well as giving Alder Hey improved access to medication and administration records.
 
Paediatric prescribing is often complex due to drug dose levels often needing to be altered regularly due to the age and weight of patients whose parameters often change more rapidly than adult scenarios. This requires clinicians to consider many different variables to ensure the correct dose is administered. The JAC solution is able to cater for Alder Hey's key paediatric requirements, ensuring critical variables, such as weight and body surface area are included when calculating doses for  each individual child.
 
The EPMA system will also accelerate the distribution of discharge summaries to GPs and provide clinicians with an effective method for monitoring prescribing habits against Trust protocol.
 
Heather Swanston, EPS Project Manager at Alder Hey Children's NHS Foundation Trust said: "JAC's EPMA solution will provide staff with closer management of prescriptions and will be key in streamlining the prescribing process by reducing the amount of data entry involved. The system will also help to improve patient safety, eliminate errors, and allow Alder Hey to undertake extensive reporting and patient level costing for better financial management."
 
Alder Hey went through a tendering process and selected JAC's e-prescribing solution for its rich functionality, and ability to fully integrate with the Trust's existing JAC stock control system. The benefits of this approach includes reducing administration overheads, transcription errors and providing a Trust wide unified drug database.
 
E-prescribing functionality will be first rolled out to both inpatient and outpatient wards, with the intention of extending the outreach to the Trust's community sites in the future.
 
In addition to enhancing compliance and reducing errors, e-prescribing can deliver savings in drug costs through closer management of prescriptions, and can cut the time taken to discharge patients by reducing waiting times for take-out medication, helping to free up beds.  It also gives comprehensive audit trails for prescribing and medicines administration, improving clinical governance.
 
The system also incorporates First DataBank Europe's Multilex Drug Data File, which provides clinical users with patient-specific clinical decision support.

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