A new health economic evaluation of Dosium’s Touchdose has calculated that the solution could save a conservative £178,302,941 per year if rolled out across all of NHS secondary care. [1]

It projected that the financial impact of the 84% reduction in prescribing errors associated with Touchdose (published in BMJ Quality & Safety, in a study from Imperial College London) [2] would significantly reduce the costs associated with these mistakes, including patient harm. For example, using Touchdose could avoid 448,231 bed days. It also looked at the financial impact of a reduction in time to prescribe as a result of Touchdose.

The average saving for a hospital would be £3,780,788, on the basis that medication errors without Touchdose cause 12,114 excess bed days per trust, costing £4,917,984. For more on the methodology used to make these calculations, read the full evaluation.

The evaluation did not look at the potential impact of Touchdose on reducing the costs of manual EPMA updates, or on the reduction of litigation costs relating to prescribing errors. These are likely to be substantial and will be the subject of future evaluations.

“I’m thrilled to see these results, which quantify what we’ve long known at Dosium: that Touchdose has a huge and important role to play in reducing avoidable harm from prescribing errors, and that this role can generate huge financial savings for the NHS.

With digital technology central to the NHS’s vision for the future, now is the time to invest in foundational technologies that solve problems we really ought to be on top of, like avoidable prescribing errors.”

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Nicholas Appelbaum

CEO and Co-Founder, Dosium

Reduction in patient harm

The study, run by researchers from Imperial College London, looked at the number of prescriptions ordered, error rates, and associated patient harm resulting from errors (leading to increased length of stay) without Touchdose, and compared this to projected NHS figures without the solution.

Prescribing errors in hospitals are a significant issue, with 13.2% of paediatric and 8.8% of adult prescriptions reported to contain at least one mistake, and almost 60% of errors likely to cause severe or moderate harm. However, errors historically go under-reported, with some studies pointing to as little as 1.1% of incidents recorded on hospitals’ systems.

Touchdose is already in use across west London, benefitting a potential half a million children in the West London Children’s Healthcare partnership, which brings together paediatric services for Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. Prescribers access detailed patient-specific dosing recommendations through the solution instead of manually working them out, a stressful and error-prone process.

Touchdose is integrated within the electronic health record (EHR) 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.

Beyond secondary care

The findings of this evaluation have important implications for primary care, where the majority of NHS medicines are prescribed, and where 71% of the 66 million potentially clinically significant errors occur. [3]

To arrange a demo of Touchdose for your organisation, get in touch with our team.