The Northern Territory government has launched a new electronic prescription service that aims to reduce discrepancies caused by doctor's handwriting and improve patient care.
The million-dollar Electronic Transfer of Prescriptions (ETP) project is a product of two year's development and will provide health care agencies, including hospitals, general practitioners and aged care facilities with faster and less error prone pharmaceutical service.
Top End Division of General Practice E-health program manager, Matt Antcliff, said the project builds on the shift to e-health to minimise paper use and improve accuracy.
"Doctor's have been able to create electronic prescriptions, but they still needed to print it out and sign it," Antcliff said.
"[ETP] means the prescription can be electronically signed and sent off to be retrieved by a pharmacy from our servers, eliminating error.
"There are a lot of people admitted to hospital caused by errors in prescriptions where the wrong drug or dosage is handed out."
Prescriptions are filled out on electronic forms, encrypted, and sent to servers owned by Northern Territory Health. Pharmacies can then download the prescription and allocate medicines without having to decipher handwritten documents.
Antcliff said the encryption used reduces the risk of prescriptions being stolen.
"It is far more secure than the old method. All you basically needed to do before was steal a doctor's pad," he said.
Doctors visiting aged care facilities can use the technology to fill out prescriptions from mobile devices and send them off for collection.
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Trials conducted at an aged care facility and Cavenagh Medical Centres in the Northern Territory received "very positive" feedback. Users said the technology sped up medication delivery and was easy to use. A further six month trial will be conducted in other aged care facilities.ETP is another step towards a complete e-health architecture. The technology will continue to operate alongside paper-based prescriptions, until governments agree on an identification measure for patients to collect medications.
Antcliff said Medicare cards cannot be used because of privacy implications, but said the federal government is considering a Public Key Infrastructure token which would give patients a unique health identifier.
The project required significant changes to the Health Act, pertaining to Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.
ETP could be deployed nationally, Antcliff said, because it is built on the Health Level 7 (HL7) international standard for electronic health care. Most of Australia's 6000 pharmacies already adhere to the standard, and would need scant modification of their clinical information systems to accommodate ETP.
The platform's messaging technology was designed by Argus Connect, while the National E-Health Transition Authority (NETA) assisted with standardisation. ETP use the Genie clinical management system.