The NHS Electronic Prescription Service is part of the NHS National Programme for IT of the National Health Service in England. It enables the electronic transfer of medical prescriptions from doctors (or other prescribers) to pharmacies and other dispensers and electronic notification to the reimbursement agency, NHS Prescription Services.
The project is to be delivered in two releases:
Release 1 retains the paper prescription and adds a barcode to it allowing pharmacy to access a centrally held copy of the prescription. This phase has been extensively deployed among general practitioner systems and slightly less so in pharmacy systems.
In Release 2 an electronic prescription can be used where the patient nominates a pharmacy. This could be sent electronically although a paper token may be printed off also (FP10DT) unlike a standard FP10, this is not actually a legal document and no drugs can be legally dispensed without the electronic message downloaded from the NHS Spine.
