Over the next few years, the Connecting for Health IT programme for the NHS in England is due to implement electronic prescribing systems at all hospitals in England. Furthermore, the other UK countries are likely to follow suit with clinical IT implementation programmes, and these developments will generate interest in electronic prescribing at European and international level. There is therefore likely to be an exponential growth in the significance of electronic prescribing over the next ten years. Principles of Electronic Prescribing discusses the basic principles of design and implementation of secondary care electronic medicines management systems, and how their design and configuration can impact on benefits realization, hospital workflow and clinical practice.
Electronic prescribing (EP) is a complex discipline, the success of which relies on the successful interplay of system design, data support and clinical practice. It represents the use of electronic systems to facilitate and enhance communication of a prescription or medicine order, and improves legibility and completeness of prescriptions, improves availability of electronic decision support tools at the point of prescribing, enables a comprehensive audit trail, and reduces medication-related errors. These benefits are far-reaching in significance, both in terms of their effects on risk management and risk reduction and their financial impact. Given the likely growth of interest in electronic medicines management, this discussion of relevant design issues and their impact is timely.
Electronic Prescribing: Principles and Practice discusses the basic principles of the design and implementation of secondary care electronic medicine management systems, and how they impact hospital workflow and clinical practice. It documents the key aspects of EP systems for use in secondary care, including design issues, data support, benefits and the ways in which electronic medicines management systems can optimize clinical and professional practice.Because of the significance of electronic medicines management to the whole medical supply chain, and the various stakeholders involved in the IT implementations, the book will be of interest to a wide range of professionals, from hospital pharmacists and prescribing physicians to health system managers and informaticians.
