Worcestershire Acute Hospitals launches electronic prescribing

Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust has gone live with an electronic prescribing and medicines administration (ePMA) system.

Altera Digital Health’s Sunrise was launched across 56 inpatient wards and urgent care areas across the trust’s three hospital sites in November 2025 to digitise disparate and paper-based workflows.

The system is intended to streamline the electronic discharge process by ensuring that discharge medication orders are immediately available for dispensing, helping to avoid delays resulting from the transfer of the paper medication chart from ward to pharmacy.

Harry de Voil, chief information officer for allied health and nursing at Worcestershire Acute Hospitals, said: “This latest ePMA go-live is an important step on our digital maturity journey.

“Not only is it key to driving efficiency, quality and patient flow improvements, but it is also a key enabler for other aspects of our electronic patient record (EPR) and patient safety enhancements further on in the journey, such as closed-loop e-prescribing.”

Prior to go-live, teams had to manually transcribe the prescriptions into the electronic discharge summaries, but now, the information is automatically pulled across from the solution.

Clinical decision support and alerts, such as allergy and interaction warnings, have also been introduced based on the patient’s record and the medication being ordered, which is designed to support patient safety, reduce medication errors and improve adherence to evidence-based guidelines.

The trust said that in the first week of the system being live, more than 800 patients transcribed from paper to the ePMA, and more than 23,000 medicines were recorded as administered.

Mark Hutchinson, executive vice president at Altera Digital Health (UK and EMEA), said: “I would like to extend my congratulations to Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust for achieving another successful milestone on their EPR roadmap.

“They should be very proud because the immediate and longer-term benefits of ePMA are game changing when it comes to supporting safer and faster patient care.

“I’m pleased to report that this go-live means 100% of our UK clients are live with ePMA. The Worcestershire team excelled throughout the implementation, and it was great to be part of that experience.

“Worcestershire’s approach to lay a solid EPR foundation and build on that with modular rollouts such as this one places them in a strong position for long-term digital maturity and integrated care.

“We’ll be supporting them in this endeavour as they expand the functionality of their integrated EPR further.”

The ePMA go-live follows the deployment of Altera Digital Health’s Sunrise EPR at at Worcestershire Acute Hospitals in March 2023.