Community trial of Electronic Prescription Service under way

MEDIA RELEASE
5 May 2011

Community trial of Electronic Prescription Service under way

The community trial of the New Zealand Electronic Prescription Service (NZePS), which enables general practice doctors to send prescriptions to community pharmacists electronically, began in late March in Auckland. The trial is the first phase of a national NZePS roll-out plan.

In the first phase of the trial, a GP and a pharmacy system – My Practice and Healthsoft – will test an initial version of the Service.

Auckland firm Simpl has been chosen to be the transaction broker vendor in the trial. Simpl was selected from a number of companies who responded to an independent Expression of Interest process run by the National Institute of Health Innovation on behalf of the National IT Health Board. Simpl developed an ePrescription Service for the Pharmacy Guild of Australia in 2008 which the firm’s chief executive Bennett Medary says is used by 6500 doctors and 2950 pharmacies.

The National IT Health Board have contracted Patients First (the primary care quality and information programme) to run the NZePS project. Initial testing of the NZePS was successful. “It has so far taken only four months to implement a working system,” says the technical project manager for the community trial, André Bredenkamp, from Patients First.

The Service enables a prescription to be transmitted electronically by a prescriber’s system to a transaction broker. The patient will be given a printed prescription signed by the prescribing doctor. When the patient presents the script to a community pharmacist, the pharmacist will download the prescription from the broker, verify the prescription, import the details into the pharmacy system and then dispense the medication to the patient.

One feature of the Service is that a barcode is included on a paper prescription. The barcode is an identification (order) number for the prescription, which makes it easy for the pharmacy to match and download a patient’s prescription from the transaction broker. It will also ensure that once the medication on the prescription has been dispensed, it cannot be dispensed again.

Electronic prescribing has been identified as a goal to improve safety and efficiency in the health system and is a priority in the National Health IT Plan. Over the past few years, progress has focused on developing the standards necessary to enable the smooth transfer of medicines information between GP and pharmacy systems. One example of this is the New Zealand Universal List of Medicines (NZULM) which will be universally used across the sector (www.nzulm.org.nz).

The ePrescribing Service will introduce a number of benefits for patients, doctors and pharmacists alike. Patient safety will be improved by making prescriptions more accurate; by reducing manual data entry and therefore transcription errors; and by the ability to send status updates to the prescriber if requested, for example notifying a doctor when a prescription has been picked up. Hospital admissions can be reduced because prescribers and pharmacists will be able to monitor patient adherence to medication plans.

Once the service has been fully rolled out, New Zealanders and their healthcare professionals will be able to access an online record of their prescriptions.

“This is an exciting development and a significant step forward,” says IT Health Board director Graeme Osborne.
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