Four north east London trusts are benefitting from the deployment of a new electronic prescription service (EPS) from CLEO Systems, helping to streamline the process of ordering prescriptions and empower outpatient clinicians.
The CLEO SOLO EPS has been implemented at Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust, East London NHS Foundation Trust and North East London NHS Foundation Trust with Homerton Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust currently trialling the solution.
CLEO completed its successful first of type pilot of the EPS with Midlands Partnership Foundation NHS Trust back in August last year.
The solution digitises the process of sending FP10 prescriptions within a secondary care outpatient setting to community pharmacies. This enables patients’ prescriptions to be created and sent electronically to a pharmacy that is convenient for the patient.
As well as delivering a good experience for patients and giving them a choice over which pharmacy to use, it also relieves pressure on GPs from prescribing medication to patients who have not been directly assessed.
It also helps to reduce the time-intensive processes and duplication of work that often occur between primary and secondary care, as well as costs associated with FP10 pad orders and postage.
Clinicians in secondary care settings can focus on patient care by eliminating administrative restrictions. While in remote clinic settings, the removal of the need to order, keep, stamp and record each paper FP10 is removed, ensuring patients can quickly and conveniently obtain their medications.
Sarla Drayan, chief pharmacist at Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust, said: “There are many benefits of this new EPS. It helps streamline how patients get the medication they need following their hospital appointment, reduces clinician time spent managing manual prescriptions, and improves safety by reducing the risk of missing prescriptions.”
Dr Paul Perry, medical director, CLEO Systems, said: “Clinical safety is a key focus for us at CLEO and the elimination of handwriting from the prescribing process – and therefore errors stemming from this – is a massive plus.”
He continued: “We look forward to continuing to implement CLEO SOLO EPS which is already demonstrating not only an ability to improve quality of prescribing activities and clinical safety but also, delivered from day one a measurable cost reduction for each NHS trust.”
In the coming weeks the EPS is also set to go live at Barts Health NHS Trust as well.