NHS Care Services

Acute Medication Service

The Right Medicine made a commitment to the national roll out of Electronic Transmission of Prescription Information. The first phase of this rollout was the connection of all pharmacy contractors to an N3 connection either directly or through their company spine.

The Acute Medication Service (AMS) is the first building block in the introduction of electronic transmission of prescription information (ETP) between GP prescribers and community pharmacy contractors.

The rollout required reconfiguration of GP systems software and the installation of bar-code scanners and software updates to community pharmacy contractors’ patient medication record systems.

Process

Once the GP software was reconfigured, GP10 prescriptions carried a barcode with a unique code. In the background when the prescription is printed an electronic message is generated. The electronic message once generated is sent securely to ePharmacy message store.

The electronic message contains the patient’s name, address, date of birth, CHI number, name of Medicine(s) to be dispensed, dosage instruction for the medicines, GP details and the date the prescription was generated.

When the patient presents the GP10 prescription to the community pharmacy contractor for dispensing, the barcode containing a unique code is scanned. The scanning of the barcode allows the retrieval by the pharmacy contractor of the electronic message from the message store.

The information retrieved from the barcode supports the community pharmacy to dispense the prescription. Upon completion of the dispensing the community pharmacy contractor endorses the prescription electronically before submitting an electronic claim message to Practitioner Services for remuneration and reimbursement of the items supplied.

When the prescriptions are presented for payment at Practitioner Services the barcodes are rescanned. The information supplied by the pharmacy in the electronic claim message is used to inform remuneration and reimbursement.

ePay

The downloaded electronic claim messages will be remunerated using ePay. ePay is a key component of the ePharmacy programme. ePay is the automated application of the PSD pricing rules to electronic claim messages.

The use of ePay to automatically pay for items is currently being rolled out. As of 1st June 2010 two hundred lines are now automated. Further lines will be added over the next few months and CPS has made information on those lines here.

Support

To help support the rollout of eAMS NES have produced an implementation pack. The implementation pack is available online.