West London Children’s Healthcare, which brings together acute and specialist services for almost 500,000 children, has gone live with Dosium to improve prescribing safety for children and young people.
West London Children’s Healthcare (WLCH), which brings together acute and specialist services for almost 500,000 children across Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, has gone live with digital solution Dosium to improve prescribing safety for children and young people.
The rollout has begun in the children’s A&E at St Mary’s Hospital and will later spread across five additional departments to benefit all children treated by WLCH in a bid to tackle the well-known and pervasive issue of medication errors - which total 237M in England every year and result in more than 18,000 avoidable NHS bed days.
The project, using Dosium’s Touchdose solution, is funded through NHS England’s first-of-type scheme and will allow prescribers to access detailed patient-specific dosing recommendations instead of manually working them out – a stressful and error prone process.
Calculating drug doses for children is significantly more complex than for adults due to differences in body composition, metabolism, and other factors - all of which present a challenge for prescribers. Even a small error can have considerable impact and traditional calculation methods do little to alleviate the risk. Recommendations will include administration route, frequency, and duration of treatment.
The solution has already been shown to reduce prescribing errors by more than 76%*, and this implementation will further analyse its role in reducing drug prescription errors, as well as reducing the configuration workload for EPMA teams.
Professor Ian Maconochie, CCIO at West London Children’s Healthcare and Consultant in Children’s Emergency Medicine at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust said:
"We're thrilled to go live with Dosium, a crucial step in our mission to reduce prescription errors and prevent avoidable harm. This partnership is a significant stride forward for healthcare in northwest London, ensuring that our young patients receive the safest care possible."
Dr Nicholas Appelbaum, Co-Founder of Dosium, said:
“Busy staff across the country are working out prescription dosages on paper because they lack safe and effective tools to do it automatically. In 2024, this simply shouldn’t be the case. We’re thrilled to get to work changing this in northwest London in a partnership that will reduce prescription errors - and crucially, reduce the avoidable harm that can result.”
Founded by a doctor in response to the “terrifying” experience of prescribing for children in emergency situations, Dosium is the only clinical decision support solution that is integrated directly with British National Formulary and British National Formulary for Children (BNF and BNFC), using this data to automatically determine the correct prescription dose for any patient.
The solution is integrated within the Electronic Health Record (EHR) system and incorporates patient factors drawn from individual health records. It bases its recommendations and calculations on elements such as weight, age, body surface area, ideal body weight, sex, and condition, all aligned with the latest NICE-approved BNFC and local guidelines.
*In a recent real-world simulation out of Imperial College London, Dosium reduced prescribing errors by 76.5% compared with standard practice and reduced the time it took to prescribe by 20%. 96% of users felt the tool reduced their workload around prescribing.
Six departments across three hospitals run by two NHS trusts will go live with Dosium. St Mary’s Paediatric A&E (Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust) goes live first, followed by St Mary’s general paediatrics department.
Next will be Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust’s A&E department (paediatric patients) and general paediatrics, followed by paediatric patients treated at West Middlesex University Hospital’s A&E and general medicine department.
Founded by a doctor and a dedicated team of patient safety experts, Dosium is on a mission to reduce avoidable harm caused by prescribing errors - a problem that is pervasive, yet largely avoidable with the right technology.
Through its exclusive integration with British National Formulary and British National Formulary for Children (BNF and BNFC), Dosium’s Touchdose tool offers dose recommendations that include frequency, duration, and route of administration. It accurately calculates the correct dosage based on the specific patient, drug, and condition.
Dosium offers an alternative to manual and error prone methods, which include mental arithmetic, unregulated apps, and/or the use of systems that overload staff with alerts and notifications but do little to improve safety.
The company was born at Imperial College London’s Institute of Global Health Innovation, using clinical insights from research in trauma and critical care units at Imperial College London, and working hand in hand with clinicians to design a system to truly improve prescribing safety.
Dosium has received investment from the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, which publishes the BNF and BNFC through its knowledge business - the Pharmaceutical Press - in a joint venture with BMJ Group, RCPCH Publications, and the Neonatal and Paediatric Pharmacy Group.
NHS England's "first-of-type" scheme for digital medicines initiative is designed to leverage digital technology to provide safer, more efficient, and more patient-centred prescribing practice. Key aspects of the scheme include:
