King's makes progress on e-prescribing

King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is making solid progress with its first of a kind e-prescribing system built within its old iSoft patient administration system.

In an interview with EHI TV Colin Sweeney, director of ICT at King’s, said that e-prescribing has been rolled out to 12 wards since the start of the year. The trust is the first to implement the e-prescribing module within its existing iSoft ICM system.

Sweeney said: “It has now gone live on 12 wards, so all med wards and all neurosciences are now live. It provides doctors with the ability to prescribe drugs, there’s a formula on drugs and dosage routes and it enables nurses to administer the drugs and record that administration.

“We’ve done some things to improve performance of it, so we are making people record allergies and the system now provides a number of prompts.”

Sweeney said that although the system does not have a drugs information database or provide drug/drug interaction functionality, it is a step on the right direction.

“We’re using iCM and stretching its assets as much as possible. It’s been really well received especially by nurses as they can read the drug chart and they are able to do that anywhere in the hospital.”

He stressed that making a start was what counted: “Some people have said that this is not e-prescribing and no it’s not a drug information database but you’ve got to start somewhere. If you sat and waited for something else to come along you could be waiting a long time, especially with some of the systems in the NHS”.

During the interview, Sweeney also said that the iSoft7 for those trust that started using iSoft’s systems ahead of the National Programme for IT is still yet to be signed.

He said that CSC, iSoft, CfH and the trusts are still negotiating funding but that a deal is expected to be made by September.