Hospital Medicines Management System (HMMS)

HMMS will be an efficient and reliable technological solution to provide visibility of drug usage and costs, from procurement to drug administration. The system will provide real-time information to support the operational control and enhanced performance management of services within the hospital pharmacy. It will have enhanced functionality in key areas such as systems integration, ward-based work, drug procurement, inventory management and finance. It will provide readily accessible, reliable data to inform medicines management in acute and non-acute hospitals. 

HMMS will become the platform to support electronic prescribing and electronic medicines administration when Irish hospitals are ready to adopt these solutions. HMMS will provide eDischarge functionality that compares the on-admission medicines to the discharge prescription and automatically generates a section on the discharge prescription/letter which identifies any modifications, suspensions, resumptions, or discontinuations. Any reasons given by the clinician for changes in status are also reported.

HMMS & eHealth 

The ultimate eHealth vision is to implement a closed loop medication management system: from pharmacy orders, supply to patient areas, e-prescribing and e-discharge. HMMS will support interoperability with other systems that have been built to a recognised standard to achieve semantic interoperability. This will be achieved through building the master data compliant with relevant standards e.g. the National Medicinal Product Catalogue and SNOMED CT for any clinical terminology within the ePrescribing module. This should allow e.g. a coded discharge prescription to be sent to Primary Care.  

Expected Benefits Realisation will include:  

Primary Benefits 

1. Supporting the safe care of patients in acute and non-acute hospitals in Ireland 
2. Enhanced pharmacy department efficiency through streamlining processes and reducing dependency on paper. 
3. Provide interoperability between the PAS systems, Robots, Automated Dispensing Cabinets and non-clinical applications used in patient care (e.g. Finance).  HMMS can also be integrated into existing EPR solutions. 
4. Electronic Prescribing and Medicines Administration (EPMA) module will provide a critical element to improve the safety and quality of patient care. Integration with Pharmacy system will enable dispensing without further transcription. 
5. Enhanced clinical and corporate governance of medicines. 
6. Enhanced pharmacy stock-holding with live stock levels achieved through e.g. integrated use of FMD-generated data. FMD process will be incorporated into one system rather than stand-alone solutions. 
7. E-Discharge prescriptions and letters will be supported and system will automatically generate a section identifying any medication modifications, this can be sent electronically to another system as part of the transfer of care process.  

Secondary Benefits  

1. Support the creation of a medicines reconciliation profile for a patient for each admission, which is able to be validated and used within both the admission and on discharge.   
2. Development of a medicinal products file supporting unique identifiers.  
3. Achieving electronic proof of delivery to support the triple match invoice management for purchasing of drugs as required for compliance with national financial regulations  
4. Enable transparency in national reporting on drug pricing and usage.  

Phase 1 

Phase 1 of this project is to implement the HMMS solution in five acute hospitals and one community hospital.  Acute Operations along with the eHealth & Disruptive Technologies have awarded Careflow Medicine Management (CMM) as the Single Supplier for the national Hospital Medicines Management System in locations throughout the Irish Public Health Service.  

HMMS Business Lead is Chief Pharmacist at AHDMP (Acute Hospitals Drugs Management Programme) Fionnuala King 

The HMMS team can be contacted by email at: HMMS.contact@hse.ie