BOOTS will this month complete the rollout of a medication records system that holds details of 12.5 million patients, hoping as a result to become the first pharmacy to integrate with the NHS e-prescriptions programme.

The retail giant’s Smartscript system will offer new services to customers, such as nominating the pharmacy that dispenses their prescription.

Fewer than 100 of Boots’ 1,400 stores have still to deploy Smartscript, and the software has already processed 92 million items.

‘The pharmacy systems used to run off the point-of-sale controls,’ said Boots Group IT director Rob Fraser. ‘We have replaced it with a system giving us the foundation for the national electronic transmission of prescriptions programme, and to administer things such as repeat prescriptions.’

Boots is working with supplier Systems Solutions to become the first pharmacy chain ready to integrate with Connecting for Health (CfH), the £6.2bn NHS IT project.

This month the company will discover if it has achieved the criteria to receive a certificate of deployment for Smartscript from the CfH IT team.

This will ensure it can integrate with the e-prescriptions project and that Boots has access to prescriptions made out by GPs via the national system.
The project is one part of a major IT transformation programme at Boots.