Issue No 1 - November 2008
ePharmacy Programme Update
There has been good progress in the last period with the Acute Medication Service (AMS) and national rollout now being 80% complete in both General Practices and Community Pharmacies (CPs). The 10 millionth Electronic Transfer of Prescriptions (ETP) milestone was passed in September and this will ramp up to a steady state of circa 3.5 million 'ETP' prescriptions per month from November onwards. Several live issues remain wirh one GP supplier, and one CP supplier being later than the rest with implementation, otherwise the whole service will be largely completed and declared live by November. All residual sites (and issues) will be resolved by year end. This delivery will represent the second major national implementation for ePharmacy. The programme will work with NHS Boards and CPs (including input obtained from the recent Pharmacy Champions workshops) to help CPs get used to AMS and help with the passing on of 'best practice' processes via the IM&T Facilitators.
Looking ahead, the Chronic Medication Service (CMS) is in test for the GP suppliers and is currently on-plan to move out of the Scottish Enhancement Framework (SEF) and into initial test by the year end, or early next year. This is on track to support CPs who are required to start from April 2009. A key element of CMS will be the business review of the working processes, supported by the 'e' applications. Work has started via the Scottish General Practitioners Committee, Dr Libby Morris and Dr Lorna Dunlop, to engage the General Practice community in CMS communications, as well as the continuation of the work with CPs and NHS Boards.
Overall, we are nearly there with AMS, but we all need to pull together to complete roll-out and then get used to the processes supported by ETP, so that they become the 'norm'. We can then be proud that we have implemented ETP nationally whilst looking ahead to CMS and keeping General Practices and CPs heavily involved in the testing and implementation planning.
Practitioner Services is now making use of the the electronic message as part of the AMS implementation. Initially we are using non-item information such as Community Health index (CHI) and exemption/charged status.
CPs should therefore ensure that they continue to provide accurate information in their electronic claims and complete the back of the prescription form.