Electronic referrals system

摘要

Alistair Gray (PJ, 30 June 2012, p780) makes the case for the development of a pharmacy-to-pharmacy application to facilitate electronic referrals from secondary care to community pharmacy for new medicine service (NMS) interventions and medicines use reviews (MURs).Such a system already exists. City and Hackney Primary Care Trust (part of the NHS North East London and the City PCT cluster) commissioned SonarInformatics to develop a range of web-based reporting systems to support community pharmacists in their delivery of services. Alongside other services, Sonar Informatics has developed a web-based referral system, which is designed for use by secondary care clinicians and GPs to refer patients to their community pharmacist for a range of interventions, including the NMS, MURs and other general reviews. The referring clinician populates the referral form (using a compact and easy-to-load set of information), which is submitted online and subsequently accessed by the patient's community pharmacist, who then completes the intervention.