November 13, 2024
Embedding online medication ordering in care homes
One Care is leading a project to increase the use of online medication ordering in our region’s care homes. The aim is not only to save valuable staff time in the homes, but also to benefit GP practices by improving accuracy and reducing the administrative burden.
Historically, to order medication for care home residents, staff filled in paper forms and sent them to the relevant GP surgery. As well as being time consuming for the homes, manual ordering of medication is open to potential errors such as incorrect dosage or frequencies, overordering, and difficulties with tracking and auditing.
Morgan Daly, One Care’s digital transformation lead, said: “Our project is encouraging care homes to accurately order their patients’ medications online through Patient Access. We manage the entire set up process, so general practices don’t have to take on any additional workload.”
The project team collects the details of every member of care home staff who requires proxy access to order medication – approximately three per care home. One Care contacts the relevant GP practice and arranges EMIS access for each proxy user, linking them to the resident’s patient record. Once access is granted, One Care completes all work on behalf of the practice, relieving it of any accompanying tasks.
Morgan said: “One Care setting up the relevant access saves practices on average a whole day of admin time. Across BNSSG to date, this works out to over £11,000 in savings.
“Proxy access also halves the time care home staff spend ordering each resident’s medication, reducing the time spent from approximately one hour to 30 minutes.”
Online ordering also means both the care home and practice can easily see all medications, doses and frequency, which helps with tracking and auditing.
To date, One Care’s team has visited 58% of care homes in BNSSG, and of those homes 32% now have proxy access.
Kate Francis, practice manager at Air Balloon Surgery in St George, said: “We were aware proxy medication ordering for care homes was something many practices had found really helpful. We were struggling to find the resources to work it through and to get the care homes up and running. The homes all struggle a lot with digital development, so we knew they would need a lot of time and support and our resources are very stretched.
“It was reassuring to have expert leadership from One Care. The team was able to get things in place and make it all happen in a way we would not have been able to do. We did not need to understand the care home end of things, as the One Care team did all of this.
“We know without the One Care input we still would not have this in place.”
Embedding online medication ordering in care homes
