Medicines Optimisation
Medicines Optimisation
What is Medicines Optimisation?
A patient-first approach to ensure the safe and effective use of medicines for optimal care and condition management.
Virtual Pharmacist supports practices to improve their prescription and medicines management by delivering structured medicines optimisation programmes. These services are aligned with NICE, ICB formularies, CQC, and national safety standards. The aim of this service is to improve the safety, quality, and cost-effectiveness and optimisation of prescribing across GP practices.
How Will This Help My Practice?
Our expert clinical team supports practices to drive safety standards and savings by delivering structured medicines optimisation directly within practice systems.
Prepares practices for the SNF
Proactively aligning prescribing pathways ahead of national rollouts.
Maximises revenue from ICB inventive schemes
Delivering clinical work required to claim payments.
Delivers end-to-end prescribing projects
Handling time-consuming initiatives remotely, such as DOAC reviews.
Boosts QOF performance & patient outcomes
Optimising medication whilst ensuring accurate coding.
Reduces waste and unwarranted variation
Improving cost-effectiveness and medicines safety.
Streamlines repeat prescription management
Expanding electronic Repeat Dispensing (eRD) to reduce admin workloads.
“The team is consistently reliable. Phones are always answered and emails come back the same day. It’s made a real difference to how we run our medication reviews.”
Clinical Director, North West PCN
“Fast email replies and always there when we need clinical input. The pharmacists fit straight into the team and just get on with the work.”
PCN Manager, Yorkshire PCN
“Excellent service from start to finish. Easy to reach, quick to reply, and they clearly know NHS workflows inside out. We couldn’t recommend the team more highly.”
Clinical Lead, Midlands PCN
How Does Virtual Pharmacist Work?
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Frequently Asked Questions
What does medicines optimisation involve?
This service focuses on safety, quality, efficiency, and value primarily. We achieve these core principles by:
- Reviewing prescribing patterns
- Improving patient safety
- Aligning with NICE and ICB guidance
- Reducing medication waste
- Completing formulary switches
- Deprescribing where appropriate
- Ensuring correct monitoring and coding
Can your pharmacists prescribe necessary changes?
We have a cohort of independent prescribers who have the capabilities to switch medications, optimise doses, deprescribe, process repeat changes, and switch to safer alternatives where necessary. All of these changes are completed within governance and local pathways.
GP input is required for those decisions that fall outside of agreed clinical scope.
Where changes require discussion, we can contact patients directly either by phone or text messages, and update EMIS or SystmOne accordingly.
We ensure that changes are clinically safe by following NICE guidance, ICB formularies, MHRA alerts and SNF.
How is this service delivered?
Virtual Pharmacist’s medicines optimisation service is delivered remotely. The work involved in this service is led by data, monitoring, and prescriptions, so does not need to take up onsite practice space. We work safely within EMIS and SystmOne, where we escalate any patient needing in-person checks to the practice nurse.
How do you prepare practices for the Single National Formulary (SNF)?
We review prescribing data, correct outliers, align choices with upcoming national standards, and complete early medication switches or rationalisation. This is done to help practices transition smoothly when SNF goes live.
