NHS England (NHSE) today (May 23) announced that an NHS App feature allowing patients to track their prescriptions in “real-time” is set for expansion across the country.
Earlier this week, health minister Baroness Merron revealed that “nearly 1,500 pharmacies are now offering the new prescription tracking service” - just 15% of English pharmacies.
Read more: Under 1.5k pharmacies using NHS app prescription tracker feature
NHSE today said that this includes “every Boots in England”.
And it added that the service “is expected to be made available to nearly 5,000 more pharmacies over the next 12 months – covering 60% of those in England”.
“Amazon-style”
The “Amazon-style” tracker allows patients to check within the NHS App whether their medicines are “ready to collect” or “dispatched by pharmacy” if they are being delivered, NHSE said.
It aims to “reduce unnecessary calls and visits to pharmacies”, with almost half (45%) of phone calls to community pharmacies estimated to be from patients asking if their prescription is ready, according to the commissioner.
“If patients can track the journey of their food shop, they should be able to do the same with their prescriptions,” health secretary Wes Streeting said.
Read more: ‘Domino’s-style’ prescription tracking to roll out from January following pilot
“By harnessing the power and efficiency of modern tech, we’re saving patients time, driving productivity and freeing up hard working pharmacists to do what they do best – helping patients, not providing status updates,” he added.
The NHS App now has 37.4 million registered users with an average of 11.4 million people logging in each month to manage their healthcare, NHSE said.
And it added that the number of repeat prescriptions ordered through the app has also increased by 40% from 3.9 million in April last year to 5.5 million last month, it added.
“Game-changer”
National Pharmacy Association (NPA) chair Olivier Picard said that the “introduction of real-time prescription tracking is a game-changer” and will encourage “greater use” of the NHS App if rolled out “equitably” to all pharmacies.
“In many pharmacies, we’ve seen limited patient uptake of the NHS App largely because this functionality wasn’t previously available,” he added.
Picard stressed that the new feature must be “quickly made available to all independent community pharmacies” to “maximise the benefit of the service for patients across the country”.
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“Pharmacies want to do all they can to embrace new technology and make the vital services they offer as easy and convenient as possible for patients to access,” he said.
In October, NHSE revealed plans to roll out “prescription tracking” on the NHS App following a pilot that concluded that month.
Meanwhile, health minister Karin Smyth this week revealed that the Department of Health and Social Care (DH) has “no plans” to extend real time exemption checking to all electronic prescription service (EPS) pharmacies.
