Electronic Prescription Transfers Added to Data Spine

Digital imaging and electronic transfer of prescriptions are the two major new applications added to the new expanded Output Based Specification (OBS2) for Integrated Care Records Services (ICRS) and the national data spine.

The weighty new documents describe a considerably thicker national ‘data spine’, with additional features and clinical functionality delivered at an early stage. The most notable of these is electronic transfer of prescriptions (ETP). The data spine will be delivered by the firm awarded the National Application Service Provider (NASP) contract, due to be awarded at the end of October.

The inclusion of ETP within the data spine and NASP specification appeared in early August. Until this July ETP had been run as a separate project outside the National Programme for IT in the NHS (NPfIT), and had been based on three trials live which had originally been intended to progress to a national roll out.

ETP had been thought to be viewed as rather marginal by the national programme. “It [ETP] was never perceived as mainstream, but had high political enthusiasm,” explained the national programme source.

The eventual decision to include ETP as part of the ‘data spine’ has largely been politically driven, and based on the hope that it, like electronic appointment booking, may be able to provide a high profile early improvement in NHS services that will be seen by large numbers of patients.

“Data spine was initially very minimal in OBS1,” explained a national programme official. “We have now added additional clinical capabilities earlier rather than later.” Proof of solution work on the data spine has already been completed and contract negotiations with IBM and BT are now underway.

Published by the NPfIT at the end of August the appendices to the OBS2 documents also provide an overview of each of the five English NHS clusters’ aspirations for harnessing IT, and describes their current IT systems and state of readiness.

Though only providing a fairly high-level snapshot of each cluster, it is apparent that each cluster has its own unique approach, set of priorities and state of readiness.

Though digital imaging, and in the longer term picture archiving and storage systems (PACS), were contained in last year’s OBS1 documents, the new specification places more emphasis on delivering digital imaging as an early win. “PACS was identified as a good short-term win early this year,” said the national programme official.

The new OBS2 documents also contain a mass of changes, revisions and expansions on many other aspects of ICRS. According to the NPfIT the revisions to the OBS document have been based on feedback to the OBS1 document published in July 2002.