Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Customer profile

The trust runs the two main hospitals serving Bradford and the surrounding area.

Bradford Royal Infirmary provides accident and emergency services and most of the trust’s inpatient care.
St Luke’s Hospital provides about a third of the trust’s services and is centred mainly on the recently built Horton Wing, delivering outpatient and rehabilitation services.

Product overview

i.Pharmacy is supplied as a single application with intuitive modular components, including dispensing, clinical management, manufacturing, inventory control and cost centre accounting.

The solution accurately maintains inventory movements in a true multi-site, multi-store environment and is scalable from a large regional implementation to a single PC at a single site.

i.Pharmacy separates data at the site level, uses a common product database across all sites, and is able to share data across sites. Stores are defined within a site, and stock holding areas, called ‘bins’, are defined within a store. All store and dispensary functions can be used in any store, subject to a user’s security rights, and there are full facilities to move products within and between sites.

Workflow is central to all functions of the application, in particular the prescription entry and dispensing process, in which prescription data can be entered at remote workstations and then picked up in the dispensaries for processing.

Labels and operational reports are user-defined during implementation, and then developed as Crystal Reports. There is a suite of management reports delivered with i.Pharmacy, which can be tailored to local requirements by the system manager, using the Crystal Reports application.

All aspects of hospital pharmacy practice are covered by modules that are easy to learn and use.

The Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is one of about 170 healthcare provider organisations world-wide that use i.Pharmacy.

Benefits

comprehensive functionality to support modern pharmacy practice
unique system design, focused on workflow
modern and robust technical architecture and SQL database
focused development plans to meet current and future pharmacy practice requirements in the UK and world-wide
development aligned to iSOFT’s LORENZO design model, with a defined migration path to LORENZO Pharmacy

How i.Pharmacy has made a difference

Given the trust’s volume of prescriptions (30,000 a month), it is clear that dispensing on that scale would be impossible using pen and paper, and the trust did have an IT system before i.Pharmacy was installed. But it was not without its drawbacks. Originally, two separate systems were used for ordering from suppliers and then transferring items internally. Now, with i.Pharmacy, everything is under the one roof and handled by a single, multi-tasking system.

Probably the biggest advantage, according to Sue Hammond, Technical Services Manager at the trust, is the breadth and depth of information available, thanks to i.Pharmacy. Users of the application get the benefit of being able to view prescriptions in a broader context and not as isolated pieces of new information.

“One of the major benefits we have with i.Pharmacy is that you can actually see the patient’s prescription history, rather than just being able to do a label for a patient,” she said. “Now we can see a lot more information about the patient and what has been dispensed. We can see what has been dispensed from a given ward or clinic on a certain day and out of a certain dispensary, which is great. You could do that with the old system – but not easily.”

The tracking and transfer of the medicines and other items extends from the main store in the infirmary’s main building to not only wards but also different individual storage facilities within those wards. The i.Pharmacy installation also links up fives sites in all – the trust’s two hospitals, the ENT unit, the Dispensing Support Unit and Lynfield Mount Hospital, run by the Bradford District Care Trust.

Other benefits that Sue Hammond points to include the strict security aspects of i.Pharmacy and the ability to produce up to 125 different types of reports for data analysis purposes, as well as customised labels, purchase orders etc.

Looking forward, Sue is hoping more supplier companies will move over to electronic ordering via EDI (electronic data interchange), which i.Pharmacy supports. Only a couple of suppliers have so far made the transition, and although the trust places some of its orders via EDI, most still have to go by fax. A small reminder perhaps of the way things used to be.

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