Electronic prescribing to be rolled out at 55 mental health sites

Better and Speeds Healthcare have finalised an agreement to roll out the Better Meds electronic prescribing and medicines administration (ePMA) solution across 55 mental health sites in the UK.

The strategic partnership will see services move from manual recording on paper charts and whiteboards to electronic prescribing and medicine management with clinical decision support to enhance patient safety.

Peter Bradshawe, chief executive at Speeds Healthcare, an outsourced medicines management provider to the independent sector, said: “Better’s platform will enable our clients to deploy clinical skills more effectively — helping staff to focus more time on care for patients and introduce better safeguards through intelligent digital workflows.

“This change will also redefine how our pharmacists interact with healthcare professionals and patients, allowing a shift towards more clinically-led services. In this first phase, over 2,000 users will move from paper systems to secure, streamlined electronic records.

“As a pharmacist, I welcome the opportunity to reshape how we deliver care. By reducing manual tasks, our pharmacists can focus more on what really matters — supporting patients directly to improve their health outcomes.”

The implementation will be staggered over three phases. Phase one is planned to go live in October 2025 and will inform further stages of the rollout, with the intention of the system being live across all sites by the end of 2026.

Wards currently have manual processes in place to make sure the right patient gets the right dose, at the right time. However paper records limit reporting and lots of time is spent manually collating data to generate actionable insights.

Better Meds will replace manual checks throughout these workflows and introduce automated prompts and safeguards to reduce risks further.

The solution is aimed to enhance patient safety and enable nurses to reallocate their time away from administration and paper management to patient care.

Brian Murray, Sales Director UK & Ireland at Better, said: “This is a major partnership for Better Meds as it marks our first and exciting step into the UK independent healthcare sector.

“We have kicked off the implementation programme, and the Better team is really enjoying the opportunity to apply their extensive NHS expertise to an additional setting.

“We are keen to support Speeds Healthcare with similar seamless medication management processes that are safer for patients and more efficient for healthcare professionals.”

Rolling out Better Meds across sites will enable a standardised medicine management approach for all ward staff to follow and is hoped to unlock improved reporting capabilities with intelligence to monitor and improve practice and compliance.

Stock management will also be optimised with a digital process that will identify what medicine a patient needs and automatically generate the order, which is expected to save nurses’ time spent on counting and replenishing stock and generating orders.