Medicines optimisation teams are advancing patient care through initiatives like polypharmacy management and antimicrobial stewardship, yet face new challenges. FDB is developing holistic solutions to support these efforts effectively.
The concept of medicine optimisation has evolved over the years, in no small part due to significant changes across the prescribing landscape. While medicines optimisation teams have made great strides in initiatives such as tackling polypharmacy, enhancing safety and supporting antimicrobial stewardship, they’re also facing new challenges.
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Independent prescribers, new settings such as increased community prescribing and the development of prescribing hubs are all fantastic steps forward for patient choice and access but do present difficulties such as fragmentation, unwarranted variations, and the complexities of coordinating at scale.
All the while, these teams face the same financial pressures and workforce shortages felt across much of our health service.
At FDB, we’ve spoken to countless individuals across integrated care boards about the work that industry must do to support the medicines optimisation agenda. The message is clear – a holistic approach is necessary to ensure opportunities are not missed and decision-making is built on, rather than undone, throughout the pathway.
We know that in a few weeks, ICB medicines optimisation teams will be working through their data to identify high-cost spending, prescribing anomalies, and other points of interest before implementing relevant incentive schemes ahead of the next NHS financial year. What they need is a centralised view of all their prescribing and dispensing data, to maintain visibility at such a large scale and manage the performance of these schemes once they’re in place.
Then, when April comes around and focused projects have been established, primary care network and practice teams need to be able to drive this work forward and align their day-to-day activity with these projects and chosen schemes effectively.
At FDB, we’re working to meet some of the challenges faced by medicines optimisation teams by developing a truly holistic medicines optimisation portfolio that supports safe, evidence-based and cost-effective prescribing across a system, whether it’s an entire ICB or an individual practice.
Through our recent acquisition of MedOptimise, now known as FDB CoordinateRx, ICBs can coordinate and manage medicines optimisation and incentive schemes across large and diverse geographies, with total oversight over their data sets in one place. This award-winning tool is already supporting ICBs nationwide with strategically managing medicines optimisation initiatives without the need for endless manual spreadsheets and laborious data extracts.
Meanwhile, FDB’s other primary care solutions, FDB OptimiseRx and FDB AnalyseRx, continue to act as the delivery vehicles for prescribers looking to drive these initiatives on the ground. Using AnalyseRx teams can proactively identify and action opportunities across a population to improve patient care, while OptimiseRx ensures maximum best practice and efficiency at the point of prescribing. Through these solutions, organisations can use real-time data and reporting to track their performance, allowing ICBs to delegate resources when necessary to practices requiring additional support.
We’re currently working in partnership with our customers to further develop each of these solutions individually within our portfolio of products, while simultaneously integrating them where this is of value to customers – giving individuals at every touch point the information they need to stay on target.
For more information about any of the solutions mentioned, feel free to get in touch with us at: contact@fdbhealth.com
