It follows go-live at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in March and St Mary's Hospital (Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust) last summer, marking the completion of the final stage of rollout across West London Children's Healthcare (WLCH), which cares for 150,000 children every year.
Clinicians will have access to Dosium's Touchdose, which is backed by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, from this week, and are being encouraged to use it for all paediatric prescriptions. The tool automatically calculates the correct dosage of drugs for any given patient, taking information from the EHR, local guidelines, and using a live integration with the British National Formulary for Children.
Clinicians using Touchdose for paediatric prescribing have been shown to be an average of 83% less likely to make a prescribing error than those not using the tool, with rates dropping from 7.1% to 1.2% when used at St Mary's Hospital.
Cases of prescribing error are cited as a contributing factor of upwards of 1,700 deaths in the NHS every year.
Professor Ian Maconochie, chief clinical information officer at West London Children's Healthcare and consultant in Children's Emergency Medicine, said: ‘Not only is this an important milestone in our partnership with Dosium, bringing a significant potential improvement in safety to all our patients, but having a single, evidence-based approach to dosing means clinicians can prescribe with greater confidence. It will reduce their cognitive burden and risk of error in high-pressure environments.
‘I have been impressed with the instant impact it has had in other parts of the trust and use it in my own work, too.'
Nicholas Appelbaum, chief executive and co-founder of Dosium, said: 'West London Children's Healthcare has taken an important step in improving prescribing safety. This kind of proactive, joined-up approach will help reduce errors and avoid harm before it happens.
‘But it's also about improving consistency. From today, children treated across all WLCH sites will benefit from the same high standard of care, wherever they are seen.'
