EMIS have developed a new software system which will help to monitor patients who have been prescribed medication with potentially serious side effects.
The new software, Medication Monitoring, has been installed into all EMIS PCS or LV GP systems and will alert doctors if a patient is overdue for a blood test to check for side effects from drugs such as Azathioprine (chemotherapy), Ciclosporin (organ transplants) or Methotrexate (cancer). 
EMIS’s clinical design director, Dr Shaun O’Hanlon, told E-Health Insider Primary Care: “In Primary Care GPs do quite a lot of prescribing of dangerous drugs, and some of these drugs can bring side effects. Early monitoring can help reduce these risks, but it is often forgotten due to the shift from secondary care to primary care.
"In some cases the recall procedures aren’t there, and when the patient takes these drugs, the mix can prove costly. Using these search results and the popup alerts, the GP has a tool to maintain patient safety and ensure that patients who need checks pertaining to their medication are not forgotten."
The new checks will also be available in EMIS’ next generation healthcare system, EMIS Web, which provides GPs and community healthcare teams with a common web-based clinical record.
The alerts have been designed using elements of the Common User Interface programme being developed by Microsoft, Connecting for Health and EMIS, to provide common software interfaces for clinical systems that are intuitive and easy to use. EMIS is the largest clinical software supplier yet to incorporate elements of CUI into its systems.
Dr O’Hanlon said: “We believe that this is the first proactive implementation from a primary care supplier of a recall and alerting module to support clinical safety in medication monitoring. The key benefit is improved clinical safety. It will make it a lot easier for doctors to quickly identify patients who are taking medication with potentially severe side effects, ensuring that they are being properly monitored and then recalling those who need regular monitoring.”
An example he gave EHIPC was of a patient taking Azathioprine for rheumatoid arthritis who requires regular full blood count checks for the potential life threatening complications of neutropenia (low white cell count) and/or thrombocytopenia (low platelet count).
Using the new system, safety alerts will enable practices to ensure that patients taking these and other drugs get optimal care and minimise the risks of severe side effects.
The searches are all based on information from evidence-based sources such as the British National Formulary.
Dr O’Hanlon told EHIPC that the majority of doctors using the system were pleased to have the additional software as a reminder.
Dr Geoff Smith, of St Triduanas Medical Practice in Edinburgh, who has been using the new alert system said: “This makes it a lot easier for us to target the patients and call them in for safety checks.
“Our previous system was much more complicated and involved a search every couple of weeks at best and the use of patient diaries and recall procedures. This is a major improvement and is much more reliable – it puts it all in one place and makes it easy to access. Having such an up to date view can only help us improve the treatment and monitoring of patients on these potentially dangerous drugs.”
The project is EMIS’s second recent search technology project, following on from their search system for patients with undiagnosed diabetes. Dr O’Hanlon told EHIPC that more work is being undertaken to help create search software which will identify patients with possible heart disease so GPs can offer them pro-active care.
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