University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB) completed a double at the prestigious eHealth Insider (EHI) Awards 2014 by winning two out of the 12 categories.

The Prescribing, Information and Communications System (PICS) won the ‘best use of IT to promote patient safety’ category while myhealth@QEHB scooped the award for the ‘best use of technology to share information with patients and carers’.

PICS is a rules-based clinical decision support system that operates throughout the Trust in all inpatient, outpatient and daycase areas, including ITUs. It supports: full e-prescribing and drug administration for both routine and chemotherapy treatments; requesting and reporting of laboratory investigations; clinical observations and assessments and extensive order communications, including imaging requests and internal referrals.

The system is used across 17 specialties and has been continuously developed with input from senior clinicians across the organisation over the past 15 years. It is used by over 4,000 staff at UHB and processes 32,000 prescriptions and 137,000 administrations each week.

myhealth@QEHB is an online service that offers patients access to their own health records to give them even more flexibility and control over their care.

Almost 5,300 people have already signed up to use the portal and an additional 25,000 licences to use the system are being made available over the next five years.

This year’s EHI Awards received almost 300 entries. Well over 650 people travelled to Camden’s iconic Roundhouse to discover who had won, to see the 12 category awards winners on stage, and to see the overall winner announced on Thursday 9 October 2014.