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NHS England has said it will collect medicine data each week from every secondary care provider in England that uses an electronic prescribing and medicine administration (ePMA) system from December 2024.
In board papers published on 24 July 2024, NHS England confirmed that the health secretary issued the ‘Electronic prescribing and medicine administration (ePMA) Directions 2024’ in May 2024.
Explaining the “core purposes” of the direction, NHS England said the data collection will provide a national patient level data set on medicines use in secondary care, “which can be used for planning, commissioning and research purposes”.
It added that the measures would also enable the monitoring of medicines utilisation, weighing the costs and benefits of treatments in comparison with others; enable research into the safety and effectiveness of medicines, with the aim of supporting improvements in patient outcomes; support the monitoring and the use of antimicrobials; and improve consistency of medicines recording in secondary care settings.
“From December 2024, NHS England will share data with organisations [that] have a lawful basis and need to access secondary care medicine data to support improvements to health outcomes,” the papers said, adding that this will be dependent on data sharing agreements established via NHS England’s Data Access Request Service.
“Data will generally only be shared for analysis through the Data Access Request Service and, subject to limited exceptions, through secure data environments,” which includes the NHS England Secure Data Environment.
“Instances of analysing or disseminating data outside of a secure data environment will be extremely limited. Any exceptions will require significant justification, such as where explicit consent from clinical trial participants has been obtained,” the papers said.
Commenting on the data collection, Nathan Burley, president of the Guild of Healthcare Pharmacists, said: “The benefits of ePMA use are numerous — integration with stock management systems, accountability and strengthened governance, and ultimately better data collection.
“Where implementation has been done on a shoestring these may be more challenging to realise; however, now that ePMA is commonplace in our hospital systems, we are pleased to see the data being utilised for analysis purposes to better understand medicines usage in secondary care.
“Quality indicators for secondary care prescribing should be derived and established where possible rather than solely focusing on data quality — although this is understandable at the outset.
“We would hope that NHS patients are aware and consent to the use of their data for research purposes.”
Brendon Jiang, vice chair of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s English Pharmacy Board, said: “While this is a welcome start, the House of Commons Health Select Committee’s expert panel has previously warned about the lack of electronic prescribing in hospitals.
“If we are to truly realise the potential benefits of greater monitoring and transparency in medicines use, we will need to see much faster adoption of ePMA systems in hospitals across the country.”
