Somerset NHS Foundation Trust has partnered with Better to establish a Digital Medicines Platform across Somerset in order to connect and share medicines information across providers with a vision to make care safer and more efficient for patients.
At the Digital Health webinar titled "Somerset Integrated Care System: The route to a Single Active Medication List Description", David Chalkley, Associate CCIO & Clinical Delivery and Innovation Lead, Somerset NHS Foundation Trust, and Ian Bennett, Product Specialist & Medicines Data Platform lead, Better, discussed how to consolidate the medication information from different care settings into a single coherent patient record.
David Chalkley guided the attendees of the webinar through the Somerset journey from piloting Better Meds' electronic prescribing system in the Acute Trust through to the full deployment of the digital medicines platform across Somerset ICS in 2022. He stressed that connecting healthcare more broadly is a long and challenging journey, but a real enabler of care and safety. Their goal is to utilise information and open standards to drive improvements in direct patient care at the transitions between healthcare sectors and preventative care across the ICS. Using open standards and a vendor-neutral approach, Somerset is looking to provide a blueprint that other regions can follow with support and alignment to NHSx's strategy for interoperable medicines.
At the heart of all of this is safer and connected care as well as the creation of a centralised view of medication records listed by connected care providers, including medicines, dosage instructions, medicines statuses and relevant dates. This increases efficiency and eliminates prescription errors, reduces waste, empowers patients with clear and concise data and improves communication.
Ian Bennett of Better explained the benefits of utilising data from different sources and using open data standards like FIHR and openEHR. He said that more intelligent visualisations of data will make it easier for clinicians to interpret medication data over time into actionable information. He also stressed that the ultimate goal with building a medicines data platform approach in Somerset is establishing the architecture that will form a single patient medication record that removes the need for individual systems to hold copies of medication data in their own disparate proprietary data stores.
The Medicines Data Platform combines Better’s medication and open platform product components and expertise leveraging the openEHR data model which is architected to support advanced querying for the complex logic required to compile a single medication list and advanced analytics. The approach is based on open data standards such as FHIR R4 UK Core, openEHR, SNOMED CT, dm+d which provides a replicable approach across other healthcare regions for establishing a single source of truth for a patient's medication information. Combining a user-centred design approach alongside low code tooling makes it possible to build out data visualisations quickly and iteratively to work in partnership towards a solution that supports clinicians to provide better patient care.