Electronic Information Systems Update - July 2001

Eight workshops, one in each Regional Office area, were held during October and November 2000. The workshops were devised and produced jointly by the Prescription Pricing Authority (PPA) and Prescribing Support Unit (PSU) at the request of the Department of Health (DH). Personnel from Regional Offices, Health Authorities, Primary Care Trusts and Primary Care Groups attended the workshops. One of the main objectives of the workshops was to ascertain the future requirements of the PPA electronic information systems, ePACT.net, EPACT and the Prescribing Toolkit.

From the gathered requirements the following changes are being implemented during the financial year April 2001/March 2002.

ePACT.net

At the end of September 2001:

• An ePACT.net system for Health Authorities will be available. This will provide Health Authorities with similar features to the PCG/T system.
  
  
• 36 months of data will be available to all users. This will allow access to two complete financial years' data.
  
  
• Additional user identification codes will be allocated. This will allow more than one user within an organisation to log on to the system at any one time (each PCG/T currently has only one user identification code). In the short term, due to funding issues, this may be limited to one extra user per organisation.
  
  
• There will be a facility to create and share BNF tags between users. Users will be able to create BNF tags and offer them to other users for their use. Each tag will have an attached description. This will allow Health Authorities to create tags for use by their PCG/Ts.
  
  
• There will be a facility to download data from ePACT.net in CSV format. This will enable users to import the data into other software packages (e.g. Excel) and also to build up an archive of data, should they wish to do so.

At the end of March 2002:

• Nationally-defined BNF tags will be available within the ePACT.net system. This mechanism will be used to provide tags based on the drugs selected in the Prescribing Toolkit; it may also be used to provide other tags such as controlled drugs and drugs reviewed in PACT Centre Pages articles.
  
  
• Volume measures - Defined Daily Doses (DDDs) and Average Daily Quantities (ADQs) - will be available in ePACT.net.

Prescribing Toolkit

• Drug lists used in the Prescribing Toolkit reports are defined at a high level, anything up to BNF chapter level. These lists are expanded down to drug presentation level for processing. Both the high-level and the expanded drug lists may be viewed via the Toolkit. Expanded drug lists can and, in some cases, do include thousands of entries. The lists have been restricted, to exclude drugs which have not been prescribed nationally during the last three years.
  
  
• Indicator values may be relatively high or low in organisations that have an abnormal prescribing profile (hospices etc). This leads to distortion of the graphs, making them difficult to use. Such values are being excluded from the graphs, although the underlying data will still appear on the data report.
  
  
• A prototype has been released which shows one of the Toolkit indicators updated quarterly, comparing equivalent quarters. A second prototype comparing consecutive quarters was released during July. Feedback on the benefits and which alternative is preferred is being collected from the users. Quarterly updates will be applied to all Toolkit indicators during 2001.
  
  
• Online definitions of the Toolkit reports will be provided. They will describe the purpose of each report, advice on how it should be used and the make up of the drug lists.
  

EPACT

• HAs have been allowed automatic access to practice data for PCTs.