Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board to roll out ePMA in 2026

Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board (BCU), the largest health board in Wales, has announced a partnership with Better to deliver an electronic prescribing and medicines administration (ePMA) system.

The Better Meds system is planned to go live by March 2026 to replace paper-based processes with digital workflows across more than 40 hospital and community sites.

Through the implementation, BCU aims to improve the way patients, clinicians, and pharmacy teams prescribe and manage medicines for more than 700,000 people across six counties in North Wales.

Mandy Jones, deputy executive director of nursing and senior responsible officer at BCU said that the project was the first stage in the health board’s electronic health record strategy and would “transform services” across hospitals to “streamline processes for the benefit of patients and staff”.

“We’ve taken a user-centred design approach and brought together a team of clinicians, nurses, and pharmacy staff who have engaged with users across many of our services to get their input into how this is going to work,” Jones said.

She added that BCU is one of the first health boards in Wales working to support the Digital Health and Care Wales (DHCW) digital medicines programme.

“These wider Welsh government initiatives will support breaking through organisational boundaries and create a shared medicines record across Wales.

“We will be working closely with the national team and other health boards to share learnings and insights to achieve the wider national objectives,” Jones said.

By providing timely access to a patient’s medicine record and allergy information, BCU expects to reduce the risk of errors while transcribing.

Transcribing time is forecast to reduce owing to clinical data being made available and shared electronically, which will release time to care.

Adrian Aggett, client director at Better UK & Ireland, said: “We’re thrilled to be supporting BCU as it kicks off its comprehensive digital strategy with ePMA.

“The patient safety improvements and efficiency gains are incredibly high meaning it will make a big difference in the initial stages of BCU’s digital plans.

“We will be working closely to ensure it strengthens care collaboration, facilitates a full overview of the patient medication record and integrates with the EHR system to achieve the highly anticipated benefits for patient care and efficiency”.

The reduction of paper processes will also support environmental initiatives which BCU is working towards.

In June 2024, healthcare IT supplier Clanwilliam announced that it is testing its pharmacy system technology in Wales to support the delivery of an electronic prescription service (EPS), to enable prescriptions to be sent digitally to a patient’s nominated pharmacy.

Phased national roll out of the EPS across Wales is planned to begin in summer 2024, as part of a government commitment to introduce digital medicines and e-prescribing to all hospitals and primary care in Wales.

Meanwhile, in June 2024, DCHW published its ‘Organisational Strategy 2024-2030’, which set out plans to create a single national clinical data repository by 2030.