Realising the potential of shared digital medication records

Safe medicines management is fundamental to the delivery of high quality care. But the complexity of care provision makes this far from straightforward, and medication errors still occur at an unacceptably high rate, contributing to an estimated 712 deaths every year in the English NHS alone.1

Linking medicines information from all care settings into a shared digital medication record (SDMR) or “single version of truth” accessible to all health and care clinicians has the potential to substantially reduce medication errors and improve patient safety. Two developments mean that the NHS in England will soon have the tools required to make this a reality.

First, sharing healthcare data between primary and secondary care will be enhanced by the ongoing adoption of electronic prescribing across hospitals in England, overcoming the previous barriers associated with the mixed economy of paper prescribing in secondary …