Electronic Transfer of Prescriptions

Speaker: Bob Sugden

Abstract

This talk discusses the socio-technical issues encountered during the evaluation of three pilot implementations to enable electronic transmission of prescriptions (ETP) in England in 2002. Following the pilots, a national system for ETP is being progressively implemented in England during 2005. The evaluation observed a number of technical issues, which caused difficulties observed during the evaluation, and there were also some specifically social issues observed. This talk will focus on the boundary where the social and technical issues overlap. In particular, the pilots exhibited a structural approach to support for business processes, in comparison to the infrastructural support offered by current systems.

PROFILE:

Bob Sugdens research interests encompass the interrelationship of system requirements, design, organisational culture and business processes. He rejoined CSR in late 2003, after spending eight years working at the Sowerby Centre for Health Informatics at Newcastle (SCHIN), latterly as Director of Informatics. Whilst at SCHIN, he co-ordinated the Department of Health Prodigy project providing decision support for clinicians in primary care, working with a multi-disciplinary team. He was responsible for all technical development on Prodigy Release 1, and contributed to the design and evaluation of later research prototypes, which included collaborative work with the Medical Informatics group at Stanford (Protégé). Latterly at SCHIN he co-ordinated the evaluation of the Department of Health pilots for electronic transmission of prescriptions. Whilst at CSR from 1993-1995, he co-ordinated a project which studied development lifecycles and change control processes, with particular reference to the origins and management of requirements instability,including emergent requirements and compositionality problems. Prior to this he worked in industry, the NHS and local government, including directorships in a number of companies. He has worked as a project manager, requirements analyst, system designer and software engineer. He is a Chartered Engineer and a Fellow of the British Computer Society.