A Scotland-wide system that allows hospital clinicians easy access to patient information is in development for community pharmacy.
Around two-and-a-half years ago Nugensis developed WardView – a web-based program that pulls patient information from disparate IT systems onto a single page.
PharmacyView soon followed suit, allowing hospital pharmacists to see all their patients and associated information on one page.
Now the brains behind WardView and PharmacyView are looking to share their skills with community pharmacists.
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Stewart Wright, solutions consultant at Nugensis, said: “At the moment the software is only used in an acute sense, however we have now started engaging in discussions with NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde with regards to doing it on a community basis.
“So that would be perhaps where you have got a number of patients in a region and maybe the pharmacist could visit them, or their information is updated by a doctor and the pharmacist has full visibility of that.
“It’s something that NHS Glasgow and Clyde are very keen on progressing and moving forward.”
Developing a community pharmacy branch to the product portfolio is in the early stages but Wright insists the finished item will be dictated by the needs of the sector.
“All our systems are driven by clinicians, so it will be driven by what pharmacists want to see.
“As we visualise existing data, we will perhaps build in some functionality for pieces of information they currently have no way of recording and pull all that together in a single web page view, so it’s a bit like a dashboard that is specific to pharmacists,” he said.
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The current PharmacyView has the benefit of creating a full audit trail of interventions, with one hospital pharmacist reporting it saves her around half an hour per day.
“It’s really about having that transparency of information, with everyone singing from the same hymn sheet.
“I imagine from a community pharmacy perspective you could have it where they can see the audit trail of when the patient was discharged from hospital and what drugs they were prescribed,” Wright said.
“It’s in the initial stages, I would imagine that we will be developing a community pharmacy specific PharmacyView by the end of this year.”
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Nugensis’ health software is currently used by every one of Scotland’s 14 health boards, with Doncaster & Bassetlaw Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust the first to adopt the system on English soil.
Use of the current software is typically around £25,000 per hospital site with an annual bill of roughly £5,000 after that.
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