Alder Hey picks JAC for e-prescribing

Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust is to undertake a a trust-wide roll out of JAC’s electronic prescribing and medicines administration system.

This will help staff ensure the quality and accuracy of prescribing and eliminate drug transcription errors, as well as giving Alder Hey improved access to medication and administration records.

Paediatric prescribing is often complex because drug dosage levels need to be changed regularly due to the age and weight of patients, whose conditions change more rapidly than adults.

The JAC solution makes sure that variables such as weight and body surface area are included when calculating doses for each individual child.

The EPMA system will also give clinicians an effective method of monitoring prescribing habits against trust protocol and accelerate the distribution of discharge summaries to GPs.

Heather Swanston, EPS project manager at Alder Hey, said: “JAC’s EPMA solution will provide staff with closer management of prescriptions and will be key in streamlining the prescribing process by reducing the amount of data entry involved.

"The system will also help to improve patient safety, eliminate errors, and allow Alder Hey to undertake extensive reporting and patient level costing for better financial management.”

Alder Hey went through a tendering process. The new e-prescribing functionality will be rolled out to both inpatient and outpatient wards, with the intention of extending the outreach to the trust’s community sites in the future.

The system incorporates First DataBank Europe’s Multilex Drug Data File, which provides clinical users with patient-specific clinical decision support.