An electronic pharmacy management solution is now live across the five South Island DHBs, enabling hospital pharmacy inventory to be managed within a single system, improving service delivery and saving time.
ePharmacy provides full inventory management, dispensing, compounding, and repacking functionality for hospital pharmacy services, and integrates with patient management systems, financial systems, and MedChart prescribing and administration software.
Developed in close consultation with hospital pharmacy expertise, ePharmacy replaces end-of-life software, WinDose. The upgrade will allow more efficient and productive ways of working, improved functionality and regional patient information sharing to pharmacy services.
Since August, all five DHBs are now using ePharmacy. For Nelson Marlborough DHB and West Coast DHB, the project involved ‘on-boarding’ to a Canterbury DHB hosted instance of ePharmacy, which was already live. The Southern DHB and South Canterbury DHB ePharmacy projects were configured separately and hosted by Southern DHB. Pharmacy workflows and business requirements were standardised and aligned across the regional instances.
Anna Mitchell, Regional ePharmacy Programme Specialist, says despite project delays due to Covid-19, the go-lives across the South Island went smoothly and are a credit to the dedication of the teams. “The project involved a real regional collaboration and I personally formed valuable working relationships with the project teams. It was nice to share the knowledge I gained with others and learn technical aspects of the software, and also learn how other DHB pharmacies work. The project teams worked really hard to configure the software, which involved setting up each medicine kept at their pharmacy, testing the software multiple times and implementing it on top of their regular work.”
Sonja van Alphen, Team Leader at Nelson Hospital Pharmacy, says the go-live transition was seamless and the new system provides multiple levels of functionality. “It’s a better, more collaborative way of working and it’s nice to know we are part of a wider, supportive community of ePharmacy users.”
