The committee’s position statement is titled Safe and effective dose management in electronic prescribing and medicines administration systems. The Pharmaceutical Journal has since covered the publication under the headline National formulary should be integrated into electronic prescribing, paediatric bodies say. [1] [2]

For the first time, paediatrics has a national specification for what safe dose management inside EPMA systems should look like. The committee’s recommendations are precise:

• BNFC-based dosing should be the basis on which UK EPMA systems calculate paediatric dosages and set safety limits.

• Dose calculations must incorporate patient anthropometry: weight, age and body surface area. Adult-specific content must be filtered out.

• Dosing recommendations and limits must reflect the medical condition being treated.

• Clinical decision support used for paediatric dosing should be provided by regulated medical devices (Software as a Medical Device).

The committee’s review, four years on from the HSSIB national investigation into weight-based medication errors in children, is unambiguous. [3]

Why this matters

Children are not small adults. Paediatric weight ranges from 0.5 kg to 100 kg, narrow therapeutic margins are common, and the same medicine can carry markedly different doses depending on the indication. EPMA systems designed around adult workflows have struggled to absorb that complexity.

The position statement names the consequence: BNFC, the authoritative national resource for paediatric prescribing, is not consistently integrated into EPMA systems at scale, leaving prescribers without immediate access to current, accurate guidance inside the system they are required to use.

What Dosium has built

Touchdose is Dosium’s prescribing execution infrastructure. It brings the BNF and BNFC directly into the prescribing workflow, calculates patient-specific and indication-based doses, applies local formulary and governance controls, and writes the prescription back into the live EPMA system.

Touchdose is built on Dosium’s live integration with Pharmaceutical Press, the publishers of BNF and BNFC. It is built to the regulatory and clinical safety standards applicable to software influencing prescribing decisions, with versioning, traceability and an active clinical safety case under DCB0160. It is in routine clinical use across NHS settings today.

The product’s design principles map directly to the four areas of the position statement: BNFC-native dosing, patient anthropometry, condition-specific dosing logic, and the regulatory and clinical safety posture appropriate to clinical decision software.

Peer-reviewed evidence

The position statement cites Feather et al., BMJ Quality and Safety, 2025, the peer-reviewed evaluation of the patient-specific, indication-based prescribing approach Touchdose builds on. Led by Dr Calandra Feather, Dosium’s Clinical Safety Officer, and supported by the NIHR NW London Patient Safety Research Collaboration, the study reports a substantial reduction in the odds of prescribing error when the system is available. [4]

A peer-reviewed real-world service evaluation, also led by Dr Feather and published in BMJ Paediatrics Open in 2025, reports an 83% reduction in the odds of a prescribing error when Touchdose is used in deployed NHS paediatric care: a 1.2% error rate with the system, against 7.14% in controls. [5]

A position statement is a specification, not an endorsement of any product. Touchdose happens to meet that specification, and Dosium is committed to working with the colleges, NPPG, EPMA vendors and NHS organisations to translate the recommendations into deployed, governed practice.

For implementation enquiries, contact hello@dosium.com.