Birmingham, UK, 16th January 2009 A major project to implement full e-prescribing and drug administration across three acute care sites in Birmingham s Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust has commenced. The Trust s Board has chosen to implement JAC s E-Prescribing and Medicines Administration EPMA system to ensure best practice for patient safety.

As the largest project of its kind in the UK, the roll-out of hospital EPMA will provide advanced functionality and reporting tools for managing inpatient and TTO to-take-out medicines to several thousand front-line clinicians and cover over 1,800 beds across all the wards and theatres at Heartlands, Solihull and Good Hope Hospitals.

The high level of importance the Trust is attaching to the project means the implementation is being given a high priority and is due to be completely rolled out by July 2009 14 months after the implementation team was expanded in preparation for the full, Trust-wide roll-out. A dedicated team of pharmacy and nursing staff at the Trust is in place to manage the process.

The EPMA system is also fully integrated with the Trust s Pharmacy Management system. Niall Poole, Electronic Prescribing Project Manager at the Trust explains: We have used the JAC Pharmacy Management system for a number of years. Integrating the EPMA system provides a comprehensive medicines management solution that connects clinical and pharmacy staff across the Trust.

The system further supports patient safety by incorporating the Multilex Drug Data File Multilex DDF , from First DataBank Europe FDBE . Multilex DDF provides the system s clinical users with patient-specific clinical decision support to actively check for drug-drug interactions, duplicate therapies and drug allergies.

Niall Poole explains: E-prescribing minimises the risk of medication errors in many ways: from the very basic, such as producing legible prescriptions which are not subject to the difficulties and potential dangers of reading and interpreting handwriting, to the very advanced such as drug interaction information at the point of prescribing.

Robert Tysall-Blay, JAC s Chief Executive, commented: We are pleased to continue to work with Birmingham Heart of England Foundation Trust with this large-scale roll out. Today, the large majority of hospitals are still using a paper-based prescribing system so it is encouraging to see that Trusts are realising the benefits that e-prescribing can offer, notably improved patient safety and overall medicines management.

Darren Nichols, Managing Director at FDBE comments: FDBE is committed to improving patient safety across the whole of the healthcare sector, and we are particularly pleased to have an integral role in such an important e-health initiative within the secondary care sector.

Future plans at the Trust include the implementation of e-prescribing in Outpatients.

This roll-out follows on from earlier successful installations at Ayr Arran, Doncaster, Winchester, Great Ormond Street and others.