From my experience of delivering ePMA solutions to healthcare services in the UK and overseas, here is a list of pitfalls to avoid. While not guaranteeing success, I have found these to be key factors in increasing the likelihood of success.

Ten pitfalls to avoid:

1. Making it a pharmacy led project
2. Failure to get senior nursing buy-in from the outset of the procurement process
3. Approaching the project as a technological challenge
4. Failure to get clear ‘C’ level executive support
5. Choosing a supplier that can’t commit the required project and technical resources over a number of years
6. Failure to have off-line governance to approve prescribing formularies and decision support rules
7. Failure to commit identified nursing, pharmacy and clinical resource throughout the life of the project
8. Underestimating the scale of the challenge from a organisational change perspective
9. Insufficient mobile hardware on wards that restricts timeliness of access to information
10. Inadequate business continuity strategy that ensures safe clinical practice in the event of a total system outage

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