NHS using Imperial spinout’s advanced prescription software to improve safety

Imperial spinout Dosium is working with the NHS to roll out a clinical decision support tool that provides dosage guidance to increase patient safety.

The Touchdose solution from Dosium provides doctors with dosage recommendations based on NICE-approved reference work the British National Formulary, tailored to patient characteristics such as age, weight and sex.

The product could reduce errors by 76.5% and time to prescribe by 20% according to a study, currently under peer review, by the Centre for Medication Safety and Service Quality.

The study was authored by a team of researchers including Calandra Feather from Imperial’s Department of Surgery and Cancer and Dosium, and Professor Bryony Dean Franklin, Director of the NIHR North West London Patient Safety Research Collaboration.

NHS partnership

Touchdose is now being piloted in West London Children’s Healthcare (WLCH), a clinical service that serves over half a million children and young people across the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.

We're thrilled to go live with Dosium, a crucial step in our mission to reduce prescription errors and prevent avoidable harm. Dr Ian Maconochie West London Children's Healthcare

The initiative is supported by funding from NHS England in a first-of-type partnership that aims to advance a new solution to the 237 million prescribing errors made across England each year.

The software will be used initially in the children’s A&E department at St Mary’s Hospital, an environment where the need for speed and accuracy is particularly acute, and subsequently across five additional departments in WLCH.

Improving safety

Dosium was co-founded by Dr Nicholas Appelbaum, a medical doctor with a PhD in medication safety, to commercialise early R&D he carried out as clinical lead at the Helix Centre, a research lab for design and health in Imperial's Institute of Global Health Innovation.

Dr Appelbaum says he developed the product in response to the “terrifying” experience of prescribing to children in emergency situations. He explained that although Dosium is valuable for improving prescribing safety across all populations, the company’s initial focus on paediatrics is due to the higher associated risks of this group.

“Children are all different sizes and that makes accurate prescribing harder and the error rate higher. The consequences of these errors are also greater because children are a vulnerable population. Paediatrics is where medical error has been most pernicious.”

The functionality is a significant advance on the electronic prescription software currently used by the NHS. “Electronic prescribing is near ubiquitous in the NHS, but the functionality of these systems continues to be rudimentary. It is 2024, yet in general, electronic prescribing systems still can’t tell me, as a prescriber, what the correct dose is for a given medication, factoring in my patient’s characteristics and the condition for which I am treating them,” said Dr Appelbaum.

Since its founding in 2020, Dosium has received investment from the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, which is represented on Dosium’s board. Researchers will now use the WLCH pilot to clinically evaluate the product.

Professor Ian Maconochie, Chief Clinical Information Officer at West London Children’s Healthcare, and a consultant paediatrician and professor in Imperial’s Department of Infectious Disease, said: "We're thrilled to go live with Dosium, a crucial step in our mission to reduce prescription errors and prevent avoidable harm. This partnership is a significant stride forward for healthcare in northwest London, ensuring that our young patients receive the safest care possible.”