ePRaSE - an NHS system optimisation tool designed to reduce the levels of patient harms and death attributed to e-prescribing errors

According to the Patient Safety Events service, over 700,000 incidents occur annually in the UK, with a significant proportion caused by medication errors that lead to severe harms and death. This talk will focus on how an RSE team worked with a local NHS Trust to build a national tool to help Trusts evaluate the safety of their e-prescribing systems. Funded by NHS England, the application was developed over a 5-6 year period. During this time, the tool evolved from an initial proof of concept to a widely used application hosted within the secure and restricted Health and Social Care Network (HSCN). The success of the tool has been due to ability of the RSE team to work effectively with NHS project managers, pharmacists, clinicians and IT staff. Based on significant previous research work done in this area, the tool uses a scoring matrix to determine levels of risk associated with common prescribing errors. Only open for a few months each year, the tool requires clinical users work through simulated patient and prescribing scenarios to reach a final report highlighting problematic areas. Many of the challenges presented by this project were for the RSE team to understand the clinical domain and data capture requirements; this meant working closely with several highly skilled but non-technical collaborators. In addition, there were various institutional barriers to overcome. Deploying the application within a highly restricted network and changing the technologies used over time also brought considerable levels of technical difficulty.