Patients and healthcare staff are expected to benefit from single electronic hospital patient records.
Four NHS trusts in the South West will receive a total of £3.2 million to introduce e-prescribing, among them Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust (£1,188,000),
According to a government statement, single, complete records have helped to improve patient safety across the NHS and save staff time, which they can spend on patients.
Instead of relying on handwritten notes and paper medicine charts, staff can now quickly access potentially life-saving information on prescribed medicines and patient history.
This could reduce medication errors by up to 30% when compared with the old paper systems.
Electronic prescribing systems have been shown to save time and money by reducing unnecessary bureaucracy.
Investing in the systems will help to save money and increase productivity for the NHS overall.
The funding is part of a £78 million investment in achieving the NHS Long Term Plan commitment to eliminate paper prescribing in hospitals and introduce digital prescribing across the entire NHS by 2024.
Since 2018, 216 NHS trusts have received a share of this fund and the proportion of trusts with an electronic prescriptions and medicines administration (ePMA) system is expected to have risen from 19% in 2018 to more than 80% by March 2021.