Whilst we have been promised electronic Prescription transfer between surgery and pharmacy for several years, it really does look as though we may get the so called “Release 2” soon. Many (but not all) Pharmacy PMR providers already have so called “Clinical Authority to Release”, which means that when GP prescribing systems are ready to send EPS2 prescriptions, the Pharmacy PMR system is already tested and approved to receive them.
If you want to know which Pharmacy PMR providers are approved to go, check the Connecting for Heath Web site and search for: EPS release 2- Status of dispensing system suppliers.
On the same web-site you can also check the development status of the Prescribing software that GPs use. If you receive the majority of your prescriptions from one local surgery, you would be well advised to check the EPS 2 status of your GPs software, and to discuss with the GPs their plans and time-scale to start using EPS2. 50 Pharmacy sites in England are already using EPS Release 2 with their local surgeries and an average of about 300 patients of each of the 50 pilot pharmacies have already nominated a pharmacy to receive their prescriptions electronically. Whilst patients can change their nominated pharmacy for EPS at any time, getting your pharmacy nominated by patients at the earliest opportunity clearly makes good business sense.
Obviously it is in every pharmacies’ best interest to be ready early for EPS 2, as once EPS 2 is launched in an area, GPs will commence asking patients to nominate a pharmacy to receive the electronic prescriptions, and patients might switch their pharmacy of choice if their regular pharmacy is not ready or unable to receive electronic prescriptions.
After checking the supplier system status (as above) Pharmacists would be well advised to speak to their software system supplier about beginning to use using Release 1 and release 2. If a pharmacist is located in an early adopter area for EPS2 and has a software system that has not yet completed the approvals process, then it might even be necessary to think about changing PMR systems in order to make progress.
As a word of caution, I have read that some pharmacists have reported that actively using EPS1 has slowed down their work processes, you may therefore wish to visit a pharmacy using the EPS1 version of your software before committing to use EPS1 yourself