Cegedim Rx pharmacy users get Spinal Tap

Integration specialist Quicksilva has announced that Cegedim Rx has installed its Spinal Tap software to enable pharmacies to communicate with the NHS Spine for the Electronic Prescriptions Service (EPS) project.

Quicksilva says Spinal Tap will be hosted centrally and manage all upgrades which it says will reduce the amount of time and resources pharmacies spend ensuring each branch is EPS compliant.

The second release of the EPS project is due to begin in initial implementer sites next month, enabling patients to nominate which pharmacy they want to use to pick up their prescription or have it delivered by. Pharmacies that are nominated will need to access to the Spine to download the prescriptions sent by GPs and other prescribers.

Mike Collier, technical director of Cegedim Rx said: “Compliance with the NHS Connecting for Health programme isn’t optional and for pharmacists the potential commercial benefits are significant – but these can easily be eroded if they can’t rely on a robust IT backbone. Spinal Tap completes our IT offering and ensures all our customers can integrate with the Spine in order to participate fully in the delivery of modern healthcare across the UK.”

Julie Wright, IT manager at Manor Pharmacy group, welcomed the link up between Cegedim Rx and Quicksilva which she said would make Spine compliance as seamless and straightforward as possible.

She added:” We don’t have to worry about upgrades or new phases of the CfH programme as this is all managed centrally on our behalf, freeing up our resource to concentrate on other areas of our business.”

Quicksilva says Spinal Tap enables any form of communication (LDAP, SOAP, ebXML) from pharmacy IT systems to interact with the NHS Spine by acting as an intelligent hub to interpret the HL7 message format that carries patient data into the Spine. Spinal Tap can also be used for systems integration in non-health markets by swapping out the HL7 standard messages for those of the appropriate sector.

Last year Boots announced that it would use Quicksilva’s Spinal Tap integration software as part of its EPS solution.