The Lloyds Pharmacy chain has installed software to improve security and cope with the new Electronic Prescription Service (EPS), part of the £12bn National Programme for NHS IT.

The EPS aims to connect prescribers and dispensers of drugs across England, and by the end of the year GPs’ surgeries, community pharmacies and other dispensers are expected to have access to the service.

Lloyds expects the system, once live, to process 250,000 messages a day. Each prescription requires up to seven messages, so Lloyds is using Nebulas Security’s Traffic Manager tool to sort and prioritise messages.

‘We had a good idea of what to expect in terms of network traffic once our connection to the EPS goes live,’ said Andrew Shaw, solutions architect with Lloyds Pharmacy.

‘Even so, the sheer volume of messages travelling between our branches and head office processing systems is enormous.’

The task of managing high traffic levels is complicated by spikes in volume, says Shaw.

‘There are huge surges after morning and afternoon surgeries on weekdays,’ he said.

‘Weekends and night times are quieter, with the result that our processing resources range from strained to idle.’

Traffic Manager applies a set of customer-defined rules to messages. Priority messages are allocated guaranteed bandwidth, smoothing traffic flow and moving lower priority traffic to less busy periods.

Processing effort is distributed automatically across all available servers. The tool also inspects and filters traffic, adding an extra layer of security and helping Lloyds safeguard patient data.

‘We have to comply with the information governance regime provided under the National Programme. The system has also helped us meet our internal security standards,’ said Shaw.

Rival pharmacy Boots introduced the EPS system in two phases last year.

The second phase enables patients to nominate which pharmacy they can pick up their prescription from.

‘To continue to operate, a pharmacy will have to operate an e-prescription service,’ said a Boots spokesman.