Leeds brings Theriak e-prescribing to UK

Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust has become the first in the UK to sign a partnership agreement with Belfast-based CIS Healthcare to develop and implement its Theriak e-prescribing system.

The system, which is implemented in more than fifty hospitals across Europe in countries including The Netherlands, Iceland, Norway, Denmark and Austria, will be implemented in two clinical areas at the trust over the next ten months.

Theriak has been brought to the UK following a national e-prescribing benchmarking process that the company undertook with NHS Connecting for Health, the agency in charge of NHS IT.

Following CfH feedback, CIS spent a year on further product development, after which it was able to approach Leeds as its first UK site. The trust signed a contract with the company at the end of December 2009.

Professor Liz Kay, clinical director of medicines management and pharmacy services at the trust, told E-Health Insider: “The trust already uses CIS's ChemoCare e-prescribing system for adult and paediatric oncology and haematology patients.

"Of the other systems that we looked at, we didn’t identify any that completely met our needs and the potential of the system to interface to ChemoCare is very important to us.”

The trust is now working to decide what clinical specialities to implement and how to anglicise the existing Theriak product.

Kay added: “The practice in Europe is very different. The medication database is different and there is a lot of infrastructure building which already started some time ago.

“The system is in use in Scandinavia and in other countries, so we will adapt it to the English approach to clinical practice by working with CIS. Because we are working with them we can sure that it is right for the needs of our organisation.

“The need to link to our PAS is crucial and in future we also want it to interface with our pharmacy computer system from JAC.”

The trust hopes to provide safer patient care and to achieve greater productivity by medical, pharmacy and nursing staff.

Tony Pegg, chief executive of CIS Healthcare, said: “The opportunity to work together is yet another major milestone in the introduction of Theriak into the UK.

"We will be combing our highly successful track record of chemotherapy prescribing implementations in the UK with an advanced e-prescribing product of equal track record across Europe.”

Link: CIS Healthcare