North Tees & Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust transforms their Hospital Pharmacy with Ascribe Web Pharmacy
8th April 2013 – Ascribe, the leading provider of clinical IT solutions, has today announced the successful Go-Live and roll-out of their Web Pharmacy solution at North Tees & Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust (“North Tees”).
Ascribe’s Pharmacy solution has become an industry standard and enables modern Pharmacy Departments to extend their clinical capabilities and improve patient safety.
North Tees had previously used an earlier Ascribe Pharmacy system, but the demands of a growing hospital and the need for more advanced reporting functionality meant that their Pharmacy service needed to be modernised and improved.
Ascribe’s Web Pharmacy is a thin client, web-enabled solution, that performs quickly and enables Pharmacists and Pharmacy technicians to clinically check and dispense prescriptions throughout the hospital, from Dispensary to the patient’s bedside. The solution provides advanced reporting capabilities using Microsoft SQL and links into the Trust’s PAS, further ensuring improvements to operational efficiency and patient safety.
This Go Live is seen by the hospital as a foundation platform for further growth, their goal is a trust-wide implementation of electronic prescribing, which will enable doctors to enter prescription requests electronically, removing the delays and errors associated with paper records that can get lost or misread.
The project has been supported by North Tees IT and Information Governance teams.
Head of Pharmacy & Quality Control Laboratory Services, Philip Dean said:
“We needed a more robust clinical solution and Ascribe provides the industry standard for modern Hospital Pharmacy departments. Our Pharmacy and IT teams worked alongside Ascribe’s project team to implement the solution. Thanks to their combined and professional efforts I am delighted to say that the Go Live went ahead smoothly, and we have finished on time ever since. We can see the benefits already, for instance speed of the system, and we are really excited by the plans for the future in using the solution to improve patient care.”
The implementation team from Ascribe was headed by Project Manager Steve McEwan, who with his team worked alongside North Tees personnel, through the weekend, to ensure that they were supported and confident in their preparations.
Stephen Critchlow, CEO of Ascribe, commented: “I am very pleased that North Tees are already seeing the benefits of their new Ascribe Pharmacy solution. Working in partnership with our customers is a key component in all of our efforts to improve patient healthcare. We look forward to working with North Tees on new projects in the future.”
About North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust
North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Trust was formed on 1 April 1999 and was authorised as North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust on 1 December 2007. The Trust provides hospital and community based health care to around 365,000 people living in East Durham, Hartlepool, Stockton on Tees and surrounding areas and part of Sedgefield. The Trust’s breast and bowel screening service extends further than this taking the total population served for screening services to around 400,000.
The Trust has two hospitals, The University Hospital of North Tees (formerly North Tees General Hospital) and The University Hospital of Hartlepool (formerly Hartlepool General Hospital) and also provides a small number of outpatient and outreach clinics at Peterlee Community Hospital.
Website: http://www.nth.nhs.uk
About Ascribe
Over 75% of NHS Acute Trusts use Ascribe systems and our commitment to improving healthcare IT has made us a strategic partner for a growing number of Trusts.
Ascribe’s clinical systems are robust and scalable, from departmental systems through to strategic enterprise-scale solutions. The company is a Microsoft Gold Partner and has been selected as Microsoft’s Public Healthcare – Partner of the Year for 2012. In addition to developing its own solutions, Ascribe provides professional consultancy personnel for Ascribe, Microsoft and other healthcare IT systems. From Electronic Prescribing through to Paperless Clinical Management and even Pharmacy robotic interfaces, Ascribe’s breadth of integrated systems has been proven to help Trusts improve their efficiency and cut costs.
“The system paid for itself in two months”, Senior NHS Clinical Manager.
Ascribe employs 300 personnel through its operating companies in the UK, Kenya, Australia and New Zealand.
Website: www.ascribe.com
