Making homecare prescribing work better: moving from paper to a more connected pathway
Providing complex, clinical care at home allows increasing numbers of patients to receive treatment outside hospital, but many of the processes supporting that care still depend on paper, manual hand-offs and people chasing information between teams.
Prescription renewals are a good example. Depending on the hospital, a prescription may need to be created or printed, passed to a prescriber for signature, moved to another team for clinical checking, returned to homecare and then scanned, emailed or posted to the provider.
None of these individual steps is particularly complicated, but together they can make the process slower and much harder to follow.
Over the past few years, we have been working with NHS homecare teams to understand where digital tools can genuinely help. One issue has come up consistently: teams want a simpler way to manage prescription renewals, with better visibility of where each prescription is and less reliance on paper moving between people and places.
That feedback led to the development of e-prescribing within the Sciensus Connect Portal.
Designing around the NHS rather than expecting the NHS to adapt
One of the first things we learned was how varied homecare prescribing is across the NHS. Some hospitals already have electronic prescribing systems capable of supporting homecare. Others use a mixture of electronic systems and paper. Approval routes can also differ between specialties and organisations, involving different combinations of prescribers, pharmacists and homecare teams.
A useful digital solution therefore needs enough flexibility to work within those existing arrangements.
We developed Connect e-prescribing through regular digital workshops with NHS teams and more detailed implementation work with individual hospitals. The pathway allows teams to identify prescriptions requiring renewal, generate them electronically and route them through the appropriate prescribing, checking and approval stages using eSign. Teams can also see where a prescription is within the process, giving them clearer visibility without needing to rely on calls, emails or physical paperwork.
Each hospital can configure the workflow around its own processes and governance requirements. That flexibility has been important in helping teams adopt the technology without having to redesign the rest of their service around it.
What are we learning from the first hospitals?
The e-prescribing service went live in July 2026 and is now actively being used by four hospitals. Together, they have submitted 556 prescriptions through the pathway.
Across those hospitals, the current average time from submission into eSign to receipt by Sciensus is seven days. The experience varies considerably between sites, with the best-performing hospital averaging two days, while 35% of prescriptions are received by Sciensus within one day.
It is still early, but the variation itself is useful. As more prescriptions move through the service, we can start to understand which workflows and implementation approaches support the quickest turnaround and share those lessons with other NHS teams.
At Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, the implementation has involved close work between the hospital’s Homecare service, clinical teams and Sciensus.
“We have recently introduced the Sciensus e-prescribing system at Hull University Teaching Hospitals, and although it is still early days, our experience so far has been extremely positive. The Sciensus team invested significant time with us ahead of implementation to understand our processes and ensure the system was configured in a way that worked well for both our Homecare service and clinical teams. Throughout the rollout, they have been responsive to queries and feedback, with regular communication and updates that have been greatly appreciated. We’re really enjoying using the system and look forward to seeing the benefits continue as its use becomes further embedded across our services.”
– Kayleigh Marshall, Team Manager, Homecare Services, NHS Humber Health Partnership, Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust
Digital progress will look different in different hospitals
There is unlikely to be one route to digital homecare prescribing across the NHS. Hospitals have invested in different systems and are at different stages of digital development, so the most practical approach is to offer routes that can work with the infrastructure already in place.
For some hospitals, this may mean sending prescriptions directly from an existing electronic prescribing system. For others, Connect e-prescribing can provide a route to remove paper from the process without waiting for a wider hospital technology programme.
The goal is the same: make it easier for NHS teams to manage homecare prescriptions, provide better visibility across the pathway and reduce avoidable delays around getting medicines to patients.
The next stage is to continue learning from the hospitals already using the service. The early data show what is possible, and the differences between sites will help us understand where the process can improve further as adoption grows.
