Our expertise in improving patient outcomes through medicines management and optimisation is nationally recognised, and was recently praised by Sir Bruce Keogh, the former medical director of NHS England.
Our robust prescribing audit methodology reviews and benchmarks utilisation data from a range of sources. We scrutinise information from the national Medicines Optimisation Dashboard, along with regional data from RightCare to compare our customers’ figures with those of health organisations covering similar demographics across the UK.
We produce detailed prescribing analysis reports, available to customers via the Aristotle portal, our online suite of business intelligence reports. These reports include triangulated data linking prescribing with patient outcomes, and identifying therapeutic areas requiring improvement.
Our auditing is tailored to customer need, benchmarking prescribing performance against national, regional and local indicators, to help identify areas for focus. We also explore wider prescribing patterns and therapeutic areas, looking for medicines waste, safety issues and high spend per patient unit.
Our rigorous annual medicines management and optimisation cycle begins with analysis and audits of our customers. Working in partnership with GPs, CCGs, STPs and developing ICSs, we investigate the quality of prescribing and clinical practice, identifying where improvements in clinical outcomes, patient safety and cost efficiency can be made.
In deciding where to prioritise areas for improvement, we explore our customers’ strategic objectives, response to the Five Year Forward View and commissioning for quality plan. This gives us a clear understanding of their strategy and direction.
Our continuous improvement plans are aligned to CCG strategic operating and neighbourhood plans. They maximise improvements in patient outcomes, quality and safety. They are prioritised for completion within a specified time frame and are flexible enough to adapt to emerging priorities.
Working in partnership with each customer, we agree and specify timescales, responsibilities, necessary enablers, expected outcomes and benefits as well as key performance indicators (KPIs), monitoring and evaluation.
As well as having patient safety embedded in all our processes for improving prescribing, we have also developed a medicines safety and assessment tool that horizon scans for medicines safety alerts. This information is formally disseminated via newsletters, emails, practice meetings, practice development and awareness events, clinical training and peer review sessions.
We support the use of incident reporting platforms such as DATIX/Insight. Our teams analyse reported incidents, looking for trends in medication errors and incidents.
