First DataBank Europe is fully committed to supporting the National Programme for IT (NPfIT). Working within the UK healthcare community for many years, the company has significant and valued experience supporting clinicians and system suppliers working across the sector. This position and experience is recognised by the NPfIT and others in the industry.

In March 2004, a 'Memorandum of Understanding' was signed with the NPfIT Enterprise Wide Agreement Team (EWAT) confirming the Programme's choice of First DataBank Europe as their preferred supplier of drug information and drug related clinical decision support across the NHS in England.

The Spine, a critical component of the NPfIT, is the national repository which includes critical information about a patient's health and care and which forms the core of the NHS Care Records Service. First DataBank Europe is working with BT to fulfil the drug information and drug-related clinical decision support requirements for the Clinical Spine Application service.

First DataBank Europe is currently negotiating contracts with all the chosen Local Service Providers. Negotiations are well under way to secure contracts for all five clusters and it is anticipated that these will be finalised early in the new year. Alongside these developments the company remains committed to working closely with all of its customers to provide integrated knowledge to support their clinical solutions - both NPfIT compliant solutions and those designed for other healthcare markets.

First DataBank Europe places great emphasis on ensuring that product development is in line with the objectives and targets of the NPfIT. We are currently contributing to the NPfIT terminology forum to better understand how decision support can be enhanced using SNOMED Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT). The company is reviewing and revising its Contraindications, Precautions and Warnings modules to provide enhanced functionality based on SNOMED CT. Development is also in process for driving Adverse Drug Reaction checking through the use of SNOMED CT substances and dm+d codes. We are currently linking to the NHS dm+d (dictionary of medicines and devices) codes to facilitate the interoperability between the Multilex Drug Data File and the dm+d.

As a chosen supplier of NPfIT, First DataBank Europe will be distributing dm+d content to its customers in addition to Multilex DDF content. Furthermore we are working with NPfIT to allow our data sets to be distributed via the Terminology Reference-Data Update Distribution mechanism (TRUD). This will allow our decision support content to be pushed to LSP’s at the same time as updates to SNOMED CT and dm+d are released.

Other new functionality is in progress awaiting confirmation of requirements from the NPfIT. We are for example, participating in workshops around the Common User Interface Project being lead by Microsoft and regularly attend ‘Clinical Weeks’ where discussion takes place regarding requirements and workflows within NPfIT.

First DataBank Europe remains committed to working with system developers outside the NPfIT to ensure that the same high levels of care are available throughout the UK. Many of our business partners have clinical applications in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland which require additional functionality from the Multilex Drug Data File including country specific Drug Tariff information and endorsing rules.