Electronic Prescriptions for Community Pharmacies

The Electronic Prescription Service (EPS) in primary care allows GPs and other prescribers to send prescriptions electronically to a dispenser of the patient’s choice. It reduces our use of paper and makes the prescribing and dispensing process easier and more convenient for patients and health staff.

EPS is a secure digital service and may only be accessed by health professionals authorised to use it. It is not a clinical prescribing system but is used to manage the workflow of prescriptions from prescriber to dispenser.

EPS is a new digital medicines service provided by Digital Health and Care Wales (DHCW) in collaboration with the NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership.

Find out more here, along with the benefits it offers to community pharmacy and guidance and support on using the service.

EPS allows community pharmacists to receive prescriptions electronically from prescribers and enables dispensers to:

release and verify prescriptions
return prescriptions
send and amend dispense notifications
withdraw dispense notifications
send and amend dispense claims

FAQs

How do I contact you?

You can contact us by phone, email or post. Visit our Contact Us page for further information

Why have we moved to automated prescription processing?

Automated processing allows us to improve the accuracy of reimbursement to contractors by reducing the potential for human error. Our accuracy rate has improved from 99.15% to 99.54% since the introduction of automated processing.

It also improves our efficiency, making a significant contribution to: -

Our ability to continue to reimburse contractors in accordance with SLA timescales in the face of ever increasing prescription volumes
Our ability to release funds to be reinvested in front line NHS services. We process 47% more prescription items with 53% fewer staff since the inception of our automation programme.

Medicines Use Review & Prescription Interventions - what is the difference?

A number of queries have been raised by pharmacists regarding the differentiation between MURs and prescription intervention MURs. To clarify the matter Welsh Government has confirmed that there is only one service (i.e. the MUR service) but the service may be prompted in different ways.

Regular MURs can be prompted pro-actively by identification of a certain group of patients that subsequently lead to an invitation for a Medicines Use Review.

A prescription intervention MUR is more reactive, in the sense that it is the response to a significant adherence problem with a person's medication that subsequently leads to an MUR being conducted. This is distinct from pharmacists making clinical interventions on prescriptions (e.g. where an interaction is identified and there is a need to get a prescription amended) which are required by the terms of service for all pharmacy contractors.

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