Birmingham and Solihull chooses Ascribe for mental health ePrescribing
Electronic Prescribing and Medicines Administration system will help Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust improve the administration of medicines as well as general medicines management
Mental health chiefs in the West Midlands have chosen an ePrescribing system from Ascribe after winning £500,000 from a government fund to improve patient safety.
Ascribe, part of EMIS Group, will provide its Electronic Prescribing and Medicines Administration (ePMA) system to Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust.
It follows an award to the trust of £500,000 from the Government’s ‘safer hospitals, safer wards’ initiative.
The trust says it chose Ascribe over Rio for the richer clinical functionality and scalability of its ePMA system.
“We are looking forward to working with Ascribe to support the roll-out of our electronic pharmacy and medicines management system”, said Nigel Barnes, director of pharmacy at the trust.
“The introduction of ePMA will improve the accuracy and consistency of prescribing, improve the administration of medicines as well as general medicines management throughout the trust, ultimately improving the quality of service we provide to patients through increasing patient safety and clinical effectiveness.”
James Reed, consultant forensic psychiatrist and chief clinical information officer, added: “This project will deliver clear benefits for patients in terms of safety and quality of practice. It will help all of our clinical staff to deliver the best care possible through reducing opportunities for errors and allowing easy access to information which until now has been tied up in paper records. This development forms an important step on our journey towards a paperless health record.”
And Paul Thomson, ePMA lead at Ascribe, told BBH: “One of the detractors for trusts to move to ePMA is that they are struggling to put together robust business cases. At Ascribe we help trusts put their business case together with our effective benefits tool; based on our own experience with e-Prescribing and published literature, the benefits tool allows trusts to put in the number of wards and number of beds as well as the drugs budget and other factors to create a personalised, compelling set of benefits and savings based upon their own activities.”