We were among the winners at the Medipex Innovation awards last month.

The awards provide a platform to showcase pioneering new ideas and technologies developed by, or with, NHS staff to improve patient care and make services more efficient.

Graham Smith submitted our software program, AMoS, and collected £2k first prize at the finals last month at Oulton Hall, Leeds.

AMOS is an ‘artificial member of staff’ within the pharmacy department. It is a software based system which can process High Cost Drug data each month. This is a task requiring a high level of accuracy and consistency to meet the needs of the commissioners who require the data. AMOS frees up staff time for clinical activities.

The Medipex money will support the further development of AMoS and help turn it into a commercially viable product for NHS Trusts.

Read more from the night with all winners and runners-up here. 

https://www.medipex.co.uk/events/nhs-innovation-awards-2018/

1 how does it AMOS work 

AMOS (Artificial Member of Staff) is an Excel workbook that uses the inherent programmable feature of Visual Basic for Applications (essentially a computer program).  AMOS calculates the cost of all high cost drugs administered by the Trust for the previous month which are then sent to the Finance department for the cost to be re-claimed from various commissioners.

2 give us an example of how it works

AMOS is under the direct control of a  member of staff within the Pharmacy department, so that each stage of the process can be monitored to ensure accuracy and reliability.  Essentially, the pharmacist imports a number of specific Excel workbooks (obtained from a range of databases, such as the Trust’s Ascribe) and by selecting on-screen icons, directs AMOS to perform the necessary calculations to arrive at the total cost.

3 how did it come about?

AMOS came about because having previously written a computer program within the Pharmacy department to replace the manual process of populating a database taking 45 minutes down to under one minute, I was asked if something similar for the process to calculate the high costs drugs can be done.

4 how do you feel winning it?

I feel very proud to have won this award representing the Trust, particularly for how AMOS has reclaimed time for staff and the benefits this can bring for patient care.