Birmingham PICS CSE as partner

Birmingham Systems PICS (Prescribing Information and Communications System), developed by staff at the city’s University Hospitals, is now available to other healthcare providers following an implementation partnership agreement with CSE Healthcare Systems.

The system, which was on show at the Informatics Congress 2010 in Birmingham last week, not only provides an electronic prescribing and medicines administration capability, but also incorporates various patient management facilities including laboratory and radiology ordering and results reporting.

Ian Clark, head of the Wolfson Computer Laboratory at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, explained: “It is much more than an e-prescribing system; it’s a full clinical system that a doctor can take round the ward and look at drugs and results.”

He said that in any week at the 1,200-bed hospital the system has about 2,500 users. Around 1,600 nurses and 600 doctors of all grades – including 150 consultants – are users.

PICS is currently available for in-patients and is being developed for use in out-patients and ambulatory care.

“The number that impresses me,” says Clark, “is that in any week there are about 23,000 prescriptions and 130,000 administrations from those prescriptions.”

Anecdotally, the development team hears confirmation of PICS’ success from doctors who leave the hospital, miss the system and say how pleased they are to be back using it when they return.

PICS is rules-based but has been developed to allow different specialties to configure it to suit their requirements. “One-size-fits-all is recipe for recipe for resistance,” Clark observes.

He explained that PICS rules-based approach means that the system can apply simple rules such as a rule to stop a dose being prescribed that exceeds the maximum allowed or complex rules can be devised which take two or three parameters into account. In addition there is a pharmacy review of prescribing.

Users who embrace PICS find they can create new rules which have proved beneficial. For example, rules covering risk assessment for venous thrombo-embolism (VTE), now mandatory in the NHS, have helped the hospital achieve over 90% compliance with the requirement to assess all patients.

Clark said incidence of MRSA, the antibiotic-resistant ‘superbug’, had taken a step change downwards when rules enforcing good practice in treating MRSA positive patients were introduced.

PICS is still advancing with work currently in hand to link observation charts into the system.

The new deal with CSE will enable other healthcare providers to buy the system; CSE will provide deployment, integration and support services working closely with local implementation leads.

Link: CSE Healthcare Systems