South Devon NHS consortium to test NoemaLife ePMA solution on member organisations' mobile and desktop devices

The South Devon consortium of NHS healthcare providers and commissioners, serving around 300,000 people in South West England, has announced a four-week trial of NoemaLife’s electronic prescribing and medicines administration (ePMA) solution, Galileo Medication, on mobile and desktop devices for its member organisations. The NHS network’s move embodies the Wachter Report’s ethos of clinically-driven information systems interoperable across primary, secondary care and patient self-care.

The ePMA test will be run jointly by South Devon and NoemaLife from late November to early in 2017. It will operate across a representative number of clinical and nursing devices and mobile workstations in the consortium’s member NHS organisations. Feedback, whether from staff experiences or data from devices and system workflows, will inform South Devon’s full ePMA solution implementation being carried out by NoemaLife, scheduled for Q1 of next year.

NoemaLife’s Galileo Medication solution will help South Devon’s different NHS organisations to improve patients’ safety and experience. This innovation will simplify and automate administrative processes as well as reducing overall prescribing system costs.

In addition, the ePMA solution test will reduce system implementation risk by drawing on South Devon’s phased staff change management programme, supported by NoemaLife, which was introduced earlier this year. The initiative is helping NHS clinicians and nursing professionals across member organisations to adopt the latest information models and mobile care applications.

To further help South Devon’s personnel prepare for the trial, NoemaLife has been training pilot users of the new applications as well as assisting the development of a wider range of mobile, iOS-based patient care applications for member organisations’ doctors and nursing teams.

The clinically-led, ePMA solution procurement and testing marks the latest stage of the South Devon consortium’s wider drive to establish Wachter-style, fully interoperable and high-mobility clinical information systems.

Wider learnings from the NoemaLife ePMA test exercise and system installation will also help South Devon’s member bodies to more easily integrate CCGs and other primary care organisations and stakeholders into regional-level information sharing in the future. This paves the way for region-wide EPR and wider patient-owned data systems to boost medication compliance or self-management of long-term conditions.

Michael Green, consultant oncoplastic breast surgeon and Chief Clinical Information Officer at Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust, highlights the trial’s importance:

This test of the ePMA solution and end-user hardware is an important step forward in implementing interoperable patient medication and information systems that can be scaled to our future primary care and patient-owned data needs - as well as existing hospital environments.

Our clinicians are leading the design of intuitive, mobile device-based applications for better care on the ward, community and home, as outlined by the Wachter report. It’s very significant that our IT colleagues are the facilitators of these new applications, rather than having to set the boundaries on care innovation, as often happened previously.

Atif Ishaq, UK Product Manager and Clinical Lead, NoemaLife, explained:

Implementing the NoemaLife ePMA solution in clinical settings will help transform South Devon’s prescription and medication administration delivery systems - and truly harness data to boost patient safety. It’s exciting to be part of a strategic, risk-managed procurement that will bring in important new care possibilities with reduced errors and operating costs in the long term.