Nottingham University Hospitals successfully advance Digitisation Programme through the roll-out of Nervecentre EPMA

Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH) have rolled out the Nervecentre e-prescribing and medicines administration (EPMA) solution to improve patient safety by reducing medication errors and enabling clinical decision support.

As part of NUH’s long-term digitisation partnership with Nervecentre, the EPMA solution provides a safe and efficient closed-loop solution for clinicians, allowing GS1 barcode scanning of patient wristbands and medicines at the patient’s bedside via mobile devices, and is built natively upon FHIR dose syntax to simplify interoperability for even the most complex prescriptions.

Progress during the initial pilot wards roll-out was impressive and recorded over 7000 medicines prescribed and over 3500 medications administered within the first month. NUH Clinicians are reporting that staff are already reaping the benefits of time-savings and workflow efficiencies from using the new EPMA system.

Consultant Cardiologist and Deputy Medical Director at NUH explained “The new EPMA system has revolutionised the Cardiology Department. Typically, Cardiology prescribing is high volume and complex, but the new system brings with it time-saving efficiencies – previously a discharge summary could take over 40 minutes, but now it takes less than 10 minutes – this makes a significant impact to all staff and patients on the wards.”

Using the closed-loop approach, this EPMA at NUH generates mandatory information for NHS data sets and audits and opens up rich, real-time intelligence on medicines utilisation, optimisation and administration.

An NUH Spokesperson said: “This latest EPMA phase of the NUH Digitisation Programme with Nervecentre is another leap forward towards a technical platform capable of propelling NUH towards HIMSS 7 accreditation. There is a long list of benefits that have been realised to moving to the new EPMA which will ultimately achieve our digital transformation end goals of improved patient safety and patient flow. In particular, using the closed-loop approach, the EPMA solution at NUH generates mandatory information for NHS data sets and audits and opens up rich, real-time intelligence on medicines utilisation, optimisation and administration.”

The system incorporates the NHS’ Dictionary of Medicines and Devices (dm+d) ensuring information exchanges with prescribing systems in other care settings are standardised, and that it uses common drug codes and language. This empowers mobile prescribing and means doctors have rapid access to the national dictionary, local formularies and clinical decision support.

Paul Volkaerts, CEO, Nervecentre Software said “Our EPMA solution is part of a fully-integrated EPR platform, giving clinicians real-time visibility of data that can influence complex prescribing decisions; pathology results, vital signs, medical history, drug charts, current medications and contraindications. Integrating EPMA at NUH within the rest of the Nervecentre digital platform has enabled the trust to further strengthen themselves as an exemplar of safer patient flow”.

Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust are the fourth acute Trust to move onto Nervecentre EPMA, joining University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust and Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Sherwood Forest Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust who have all successfully deployed the highly usable and intuitive Nervecentre mobile EPMA solution.