Eprescriptions project split in two

The electronic prescriptions element of the £2.3bn NHS National Programme is awaiting crucial policy decisions before roll out plans can be specified, says Richard Granger, director general of health service IT.

The project is not yet behind schedule, he says. But decisions around technology deployment to the UK's 10,000 pharmacies were held up by the government's response to an Office of Fair Trading (OFT) report on the sector which was not finalised until July - months after the procurement for the other National Programme contracts began.

'We will still make the targets for eprescriptions but we are not where we would like to have been,' Granger told Computing.

The eprecriptions project has been split in two, covering patients and pharmacies. Procurement of the patient-side central application is going ahead on schedule because it is now part of the 'data spine' project underpinning the plan for national electronic patient records.

Details of how the pharmacy aspects of the service will be implemented are still under discussion.

'Because we have had to wait for OFT we have been unable to define the implementation arrangements out into community pharmacies but there may be ways of accelerating the deployment arrangements to achieve the timetable,' said Granger.

'There are a series of regulatory, technological and policy considerations that need to be worked through fully but in the meantime we will have built the core central function.'

One consideration is whether the commercial network infrastructure already linking 80 per cent of UK pharmacies could be made sufficiently secure to provide a basis for the eprescriptions roll out.

Granger says the delivery of technology to pharmacies is not the hardest part of the programme.

'I am not overly worried about the roll out to branch networks,' he said.