Midlands Partnership NHS Foundation Trust - Electronic Prescribing into the Community for Secondary Care.

Electronic Prescribing into the Community for Secondary Care.

Midlands Partnership NHS Foundation Trust and CLEO Systems work together to complete successful pilot of electronic prescription solution, delivering multiple clinical and patient benefits.

Midlands Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (MPFT), NHS Digital and CLEO Systems have collaborated in a successful first-of-type pilot in secondary care, to implement the electronic prescription solution, CLEO SOLO EPS. The deployment is now delivering key efficiency benefits, digitising the process of sending prescriptions to pharmacies and enabling improved patient choice.

CLEO SOLO EPS is an instant electronic prescribing solution which enables quick, seamless, clinically safe prescribing, achieving accreditation from NHS Digital in June 2022. It can be used in a wide range of outpatient secondary care and community
settings, enabling patients’ prescriptions to be entered and sent electronically to a nominated community pharmacy of a patient’s choice. The pilot at MPFT has resulted in significant operational efficiency benefits and improvements from a clinical safety
perspective, including a reduction in prescribing errors, cutting travel times, enhanced sustainability, as well as generally making life easier for clinicians and patients alike.

The pilot aligns with the NHS Long Term Plan, which focuses on the use of EPS within primary care, as well as the Trust’s strategy for local IMT digital strategy and medicines optimisation transformation. The results from the pilot were so encouraging that MPFT is now set to roll out more widely across the Trust.

Project background.

MPFT provides physical and mental health, learning disability and adult social care services, serving a population of 1.5 million and employing around 8,500 members of staff. The Trust had identified a need to move away from clinicians having to hand-write
prescriptions and patients having to travel to collect paper prescriptions or clinicians having to post or deliver them. Since the implementation of CLEO SOLO EPS, patients’ prescriptions are now sent electronically to the patient’s pharmacy of choice, freeing up time for clinicians and patients.

CLEO SOLO EPS was initially developed as a response to the Covid 19 pandemic and gives clinicians instant prescribing capability without the need for any systems integration. The Trust started working with CLEO Systems in 2021 on the first-of-type pilot as part of the NHS Digital accreditation process.

What did MPFT want to achieve?

Before the CLEO SOLO EPS pilot, clinicians in MPFT had to hand-write prescriptions, while clinicians had to post or deliver some prescriptions.

MPFT were keen to reduce emissions, travel costs and time, while improving patient safety, prescription security and providing enhanced patient choice.

During the pandemic, MPFT faced increased demand on outpatient prescribing. It was vital to maintain services for patients whilst also supporting clinicians. Before implementing SOLO EPS, following a remote consultation, patients would be required to attend site to collect prescriptions that were not posted or delivered. MPFT also wanted to actively address the safety risk that handwritten prescriptions can introduce such as illegibility of handwriting resulting in incorrect or delayed medication and losses in the postal system.

The Trust aimed to enhance sustainability, address increased demand on its hospital community settings, reduce the use of paper in prescribing and the infection risk that handling paper could introduce, as well as increase prescription security and save time for clinicians. Clinicians were asking MPFT for a solution that did not necessitate handwritten paper prescriptions. Accordingly, MPFT worked collaboratively with CLEO Systems and NHS Digital to complete the pilot, ensuring that the system was fit for purpose.

CLEO SOLO EPS is intuitively designed so clinicians are able to use their new prescribing solution after a short training session. The prescriber uses their NHS smartcard to log in and can then search for a patient either by NHS recognised demographic search criteria by entering the EPS prescription ID or case reference from a previously created electronic prescription. This robust method of search functionality means that patient search errors are minimised and the correct medications can be seamlessly prescribed to the correct patients. Uniquely, CLEO SOLO EPS allows for multiple cost centre codes to be used within a Trust, making financial auditing and departmental cost tracking very straightforward. Prescriber level reporting is also available.

Benefits so far.

The benefits of the rolling out of CLEO SOLO EPS have been
impressive. Throughout the pilot, cost savings have been identified and estimated as follows:

Estimated Cost Savings during the 45-day pilot:

• Stationery and 1st class postage estimated at £2,500 saving
• Mileage: approx. 7,000 miles avoided
• Travel time for clinicians 15 days avoided

When EPS is deployed to an additional 150 prescriber’s in MPFT, the future efficiency savings will provide an estimated saving of clinician’s time equivalent to 97 days, annually. Over a 3-year period this is estimated to result in a saving of 291 days of clinicians’ time.

This will enable clinicians to spend more time with more patients and deliver safer patient care. These savings will also benefit patients, saving them valuable time and money by enabling them to go directly to the pharmacy of their choice.

MPFT has seen an improvement in efficiency and sustainability, as CLEO SOLO EPS has significantly reduced the need for paper prescriptions. In addition the carbon footprint is reduced, as prior to using the solution clinicians were both posting prescriptions and delivering them. Importantly, patient safety has also been enhanced due to the reduction in infection risk. Furthermore security is enhanced as prescriptions can no longer be lost or stolen and are monitored by the prescription tracker.

Colin Jones says: “The roll out of EPS has positively impacted on community pharmacies and provided efficiencies for them, as they no longer have issues of illegibility or lost or stolen prescriptions to deal with. Internally, benefits have been highlighted and additional services within MPFT are being onboarded as soon as possible as they can also see how the solution will provide benefits to service users and patient care. The enhanced information generated from the EPS system also has the ability to allow near real time analysis of prescribing, which will allow information and reporting to be provided to highlight prescribing habits and allow interrogation.”