Advance patient safety with the right prescription. First time.
As part of a wider partnership with West London Children’s Healthcare (WLCH), Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust implemented Dosium’s Touchdose in 2024 replacing existing error-prone prescribing methods and systems with automated, patient-specific recommendations. It delivered striking results: when Touchdose was used, prescribing error rates fell by an average of 86%, dropping from 8.3% to 1.2%. Staff have reported positive experiences, and financial modelling suggests substantial cost savings.
West London Children’s Healthcare (WLCH) is one of London’s largest providers of children’s services, bringing together acute and specialist services for a population of almost 500,000 children across Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.
Before introducing Touchdose, WLCH staff - like many across the NHS - relied on various methods to access dosing information and calculate medication dosages for patients. This often involved looking up doses online, in books, or on the intranet, performing mental arithmetic, using (unregulated) online calculators, and navigating pre-configured content in the electronic prescribing system.
Not only was this inefficient and time consuming, but at every step there was a risk of error. The hospital’s average paediatric prescribing error rate was 8.3%.
While many prescribing errors don’t result in harm, some do - especially issues of overdosing and underdosing. In paediatric patients, this is particularly critical because of the narrow margin for error, the reduced ability of the metabolic system to handle incorrect doses, and the complexity of calculations–like mg/kg/day, dose adjustments, and dilution steps.
In summer 2024, West London Children’s Healthcare (WLCH), funded by NHS England’s First-of-Type scheme, went live with Dosium in a staged approach across its four acute and specialist sites, beginning with St Mary’s Hospital, part of Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. The objective was to reduce errors by allowing prescribers to use Touchdose’s detailed patient-specific dosing recommendations instead of manually working them out.
Touchdose calculates the correct dosage of any drug for any patient and indication, including frequency, duration, and route of administration, using live integrations with the British National Formulary and local guidelines.
It offers a safer alternative to manual methods like mental arithmetic or unregulated apps, as well as existing systems lacking sufficient paediatric configuration, saving clinicians time and headspace.
More than 100 Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust staff now use Touchdose across paediatric inpatients and emergency care at St Mary’s Hospital.
The results are striking. Where staff use Touchdose, prescribing errors have fallen by an average of 86% and by 91% on the paediatric ward.
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“Prescribing in the paediatric emergency department is one of our biggest sources of human error, given the complexities of weight based dosing and different sources of information. I have found the introduction of Touchdose to be a significant improvement in the process - both in terms of patient safety, and for finding the correct medication in one resource…it is fast becoming a vital tool in our workflow.”
