Kings “half way there” on e-prescribing

King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has reached the halfway mark for rolling out e-prescribing as part of its iSoft electronic patient record system.

Speaking at an electronic prescribing and medicines administration event in Manchester, Richard Yorke, health informatics consultant at King’s, said that the project has been progressing well.

The trust has reached its target of rolling out across two wards every month. Yorke said: “The scope of the project was to get ePMA live and do it quickly and provide a single process for all drugs.

“We now have 22 wards live out of 40; including medicines, neuroscience including theatres and recovery, cardiac and renal, so we are just over halfway there.”

The trust, which first piloted the software in November 2008, went live with the first ward in a low turnover, elderly care ward in May 2009.

However, in a candid account of the challenges involved, Yorke said they had significant problems getting staff onboard when they first started piloting the system.

“We had a user revolt early on in the pilot where the junior doctors decided that they didn’t like it and wrote a letter to the trust’s medical director claiming that it was more risky than using paper.

“We had to stop the pilot until we had worked together to it address the issues and we had some problems around interface, where people couldn’t understand it so instead we made own drug chart,” he added. The changes helped win over staff.

The system now allows staff to prescribe drugs in the native functionality of its iSoft iCM electronic patient record system.

It also provides them with formulas on drugs and dosage routes, records allergies and provides alerts and enables nurses to administer drugs and record that administration.

Yorke added that users are given ample training including dedicated training rooms, user guides and lesson plans and 24 hour support on the wards is provided for the first three days of go-live.

The trust will continue to roll out to the remaining ward and expects the project to be completed by next year.

In addition to rolling out the software, the trust will now look to further develop the drugs catalogues, drug specifications and order sets.

“There is an additional time allowance for complex areas and we are avoiding some areas altogether such as A&E, critical care and chemotherapy,” Yorke added.