Ashtons Live View reduces medication errors by 56%

The Ashtons Live View system facilitates the electronic reporting of pharmacist audits and communication between the pharmacist and clinical staff in the hospital. The pharmacists report any clinical interventions, audits and compliance issues following their ward visits and this information is emailed to the relevant staff and managers. The hospital staff can communicate back with the pharmacist and this ensures that any issues are dealt with promptly. We continuously monitor and analyse the data we receive from the Ashtons Live View system to identify areas of concern, discover any trends and focus on improvements.

Live View helps improve quality

It has been three years since the launch of Ashtons Live View in our hospitals, and we have analysed recent data that demonstrates the significant improvements in quality that this system produces with the involvement of clinical staff.

We investigated the difference that Ashtons Live View can make between the first five visits of the pharmacist using Live View and the results from the 96th to the 100th visit. This was averaged for all our hospitals and so the results represent an average two-year cycle using Live View and demonstrate the level of improvement that it can make to patient safety and compliance with medicine management requirements.

A 56% overall reduction in medication errors

Administration errors, MHA errors, patient detail errors and prescribing errors were analysed. On average, hospitals had a reduction of 63% in administration errors; 59% in prescribing errors; 51% in MHA errors and 52% in patient detail errors.

There was an average overall reduction of 56% in medication errors, during the hospital’s first two years using Ashtons Live View! These findings clearly demonstrate the impact that the Live View system has in our hospitals within the independent healthcare sector. Nationally, electronic reporting by pharmacists is not yet widely used but Ashtons has continuously demonstrated that it is a key factor in ensuring safer patient care.

The electronic reporting provides a database of information which increases over time following the pharmacists’ visits. The database enables a high level of trend analysis and can provide comparisons between the performance of hospitals, wards and individuals.

Delivering better patient care through continuous improvement

• Real-time reporting which provides instant access to pharmacist audit data and a suite of pre-defined reports
• Increased transparency thanks to the ability to view and respond to pharmacist comments and concerns, benchmark performance and reduce error rates by sharing best practice
• Better performance monitoring, providing early warning of issues by monitoring trends and highlighting common problems or training concerns
• Making improvements by identifying deficiencies in performance against required standards and providing a foundation for changes to facilitate improvements, leading to better patient care

Access a wealth of online clinical information

Ashtons Live View is also an important resource for clinical information. This includes the new Ashtons Formulary, an information resource for making evidence-based choices for medicines, as well as NICE, MHRA, and NHS England clinical guidelines. A large number of guidelines are released on a regular, so we take the hard work out of it for our clients, by highlighting the most relevant guidelines.

The platform also provides two particularly important tools to provide help with patient involvement: A Medication and Patient Profile Summary (MaPPs) which is suitable for all medication and Choice and Medication which provides specific mental health information.

For further information about the many benefits Ashtons can deliver, please see our range of services.