Less than 1.5% of electronic prescriptions seamless

E-Health Insider has learned that of the 1.6m electronic prescriptions issued by the Electronic Prescription Service, just under 30,000 have been seamlessly sent and received all the way through to dispensing.

Out of the 1.6m scripts created electronically by GPs, just 29,386 have then been sent over the NHS spine, received and called down by a local pharmacy for dispensing. Of those called down, 26,676 have been dispensed to patients.

This means that less than 1.5% of electronic prescriptions issued are actually being managed electronically end-to-end by the initial version of the EPS — which still involves the printing of a paper prescription.

In every instance a paper prescription is still being issued to patients, using a hybrid printed script which has had a barcode added to enable it to be later scanned.

The major efficiency benefits of the national EPS system are only likely to be possible when the majority of scripts generated are entirely electronic. This is a goal that remains a long way off. In a typical week the NHS dispenses 13.7m prescriptions.

As part of its recent deluge of statistics NHS Connecting for Health has made much of the figure of 1.6m electronic prescriptions “issued” by the EPS. However it has not previously provided the figures on how many of the electronic scripts issued are actually called down by a pharmacist and then filled.

Last week’s National Audit Office (NAO) report, for instance, stated that by April “electronic prescribing had been used to issue a total of 726,843 prescriptions”, but failed to clarify that in 98.5% of cases the automated electronic prescription transfer process does not yet extend through to the actual dispensing of prescription to a patient.

NHS CfH told EHI that there were two main reasons for the discrepancy between the figures: “The first is that until May this year, there have been a greater number of GP practices than pharmacies with EPS compliant systems generating prescription messages.

The spokesperson told EHI that the second reason is that a patient may take their prescription form to a non-EPS enabled pharmacy. In the initial limited version of EPS currently available pharmacies that do not yet have the appropriate software and smart cards to use the national can still process the hybrid paper scripts that have been generated.

A CfH spokesperson added: “The core EPS software has been operational since the end of 2004 and the first Release 1 sites went live in February 2005. Since then, we have been working with system suppliers to enable them to develop EPS compliant systems.”

The agency added that it was never anticipated that suppliers would be able to deploy their systems widely until each of them had completed an initial implementation. “Some suppliers are still working through the accreditation process and others are now beginning deployment – the volumes reflect this.”

CfH says that system suppliers will be developing their systems during 2006 to make them Release 2 compatible, which will move a lot closer to seamless electronic prescribing. This more sophisticated software is meant to become available for deployment in 2007.