Improving pharmacy services in NHS England with Ontoserver

September 11th, 2023

WJP Software (WJPS) has used the NHS England Terminology Server, underpinned by Ontoserver to implement the NHS information Dictionary of medicines and devices (dm+d)

“Utilising the Terminology Server significantly decreased the development time, from a month to a couple of weeks.”

Bill Lush, Senior Terminology Specialist

It makes our lives easier from a support point of view”

James Proctor, WJPS Managing Director

Who is WJP Software?

WJP Software (WJPS) is a small software development company established in 2004 and based in North Yorkshire.

WJPS’s flagship products include the routine environmental monitoring software Microbiological Reporting System (MRS) in use across the NHS and private healthcare sector, and Environmental Water Testing (EWT), utilised by the Pathology Infection Control team at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust to aid water quality testing at the organisation.

The Challenge

The NHS Pharmaceutical Aseptic Services Group (PASG) were struggling to capture consistent and accurate drugs data for the National Aseptic Error Reporting Scheme (NAERS) to support consistent analysis of the errors which were being reported. Aseptic units at organisations across the UK were using unstructured free text to enter and submit information.

Free text information made it difficult to do essential analytics and meant that potential to improve patient outcomes was at risk of being lost due to missing data.

Identifying and amending inconsistent data was time consuming

Outcomes

By using the NHS England Terminology Server, underpinned by Ontoserver, WJPS were able to access automatic updates to dm+d, keeping the system aligned with the latest information.

The terminology server facilitated standardised data collection using dm+d which eliminated discrepancies and provided a clear view of errors and trends.

You can read more about this in the NHS England’s SNOMED CT case study “PASG and the NHS England Terminology Server”