A pilot scheme for “prescription tracking” on the NHS App “like the Domino’s Pizza tracker” is underway and could be rolled out in three months, NHSE has announced.
The commissioner is “hoping for a relatively quick rollout” of the feature once the pilot stage has been completed, it said.
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Speaking at the Pharmacy Show in Birmingham on Sunday (October 13), NHSE clinical lead for digital medicines Nishali Patel told delegates that there are “four front runners” currently taking part in the pilot – Boots, Cegedim, Invatech and Apotec.
“The pilot should conclude on October 23, where we will be in a position to fully roll out the feature for those suppliers,” she said.
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“We’re hoping…from January onwards that we would be able to pick up the other suppliers,” she added.
Between January and April 2025, the prescription tracking feature will be “gradually” rolled out to six more suppliers - EMIS Health, Positive Solutions, Clanwilliam, Pharmacy2U, Camascope and SecuriCare - according to a slide presented at the conference.
“No-brainer”
“It’s quite obvious we need to tell people where their prescriptions are at [throughout] the whole journey,” Patel said.
“We’ve heard from a lot of clinicians and patients that this is something that they really want - it’s actually the top theme of feedback that we receive in the NHS App [from] patients and users so it’s pretty much a no-brainer,” she added.
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The commissioner wants patients to get information on their prescriptions “as close to real-time as possible” Patel said.
And she added that the ability to tell patients “when their medicines are actually ready for collection” is the “golden ticket” to keeping patients up to date on the exact location of their prescriptions.
An NHSE community pharmacy survey carried out in May with around 115 respondents found that “a staggering 45%” of phone calls were from patients inquiring whether their prescriptions had been received or were ready for collection, she told delegates.
“Like the Domino’s pizza tracker”
Also speaking at the Pharmacy Show yesterday (October 14), Community Pharmacy IT Group (CP ITG) chair Matt Armstrong said that he is “really pleased” that patients can “see the progress of their prescription through the app”.
“One of the things we were really keen on making sure did happen was that the patient was able to see when a prescription was ready to collect in the pharmacy, and doing that in the right way,” he added.
“We’re really pleased that, through engagement with NHSE and system suppliers, there are going to be system suppliers going live in the coming months to be able to send ready-to-collect information back into the NHS App,” he told delegates.
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This will “create that end-to-end journey for patients...like the Domino’s Pizza tracker”, he said.
While this project is the first of its kind on the NHS App, C+D reported in January on a partnership between Uber and pharmacy app Healthera enabling patients to order and track prescription deliveries with live updates – from dispensing to delivery.
It allows pharmacists to use the “full network of drivers…used for Uber Eats” to deliver “prescription-only medicines (POMS), NHS prescriptions, high-margin private prescriptions [and] over the counter (OTC) medication,” Healthera told C+D at the time.
