The Professional Record Standards Body (PRSB) previously established Pharmacy information flows IT standards. PRSB are now working with RPS, PSNC,  Community Pharmacy IT Group and other stakeholders to further update these IT standards.

Why are IT standards important?

The use of IT standards within the health and care sector enables people, devices and systems to communicate in a more efficient and electronic manner. The growing use of standards improves patient care and enables improved analysis.

Standards can also reduce the need for health and care workers to ‘re-key’ information and for patients to need to repeat themselves about their experiences.

What is the Pharmacy information flows standard?

The Pharmacy information flows standard is used by NHS Digital and system suppliers to help information move from pharmacy contractor systems to GP systems.

For example: The standard has enabled electronic notifications to be sent automatically from pharmacies using the Sonar Informatics and PharmOutcomes systems onwards so that notifications are received by GP practices as workflow tasks in their GP systems. Some GP systems can receive structured information, which means details can be added directly to a patient’s record, without the information having to be manually transcribed.

The Pharmacy information flows standard is already being used in Flu vaccination and Community Pharmacist Consultation Service (CPCS) urgent supply notifications in PharmOutcomes, Sonar, EMIS Web and TPP SystmOne. Other suppliers are considering how to also integrate with these standards

The clinical use cases for the IT standard will be:

• immunisation administration (including flu vaccination);
• emergency medication supply;
• New Medicine Service (NMS);
• medication reviews,
• CPCS;
• appliance use review;
• and new services recently introduced or being developed and piloted under the Community Pharmacy Contractual Framework (CPCF) (these new CPCF services are likely to include point of care testing, smoking cessation referrals from secondary care, the Hepatitis C testing service, cardiovascular disease (hypertension) case finding service, palliative care and contraception provision).

PRSB will consolidate the various current standards into a single ‘community pharmacy standard’ to enable easier implementation by community pharmacy system suppliers.

Get involved

Pharmacy team members that would like to get involved with the work can contact it@psnc.org.uk with ‘Pharmacy information flows’ within the email subject title. The work is scheduled to take place during late 2020 and January to April 2021.