SHARE:  

Recording Discharge Medicine Service (DMS) Referrals


The Discharge Medicines Service (DMS) became a new Essential Service within the Community Pharmacy Contractual Framework in February 2021. This means that every pharmacy must provide the service in response to a DMS referral.


Trusts in West Yorkshire make all referrals via PharmOutcomes. Trusts outside of West Yorkshire may refer via NHSmail, and these will need to be processed manually as there is no manual entry option on PharmOutcomes, unlike for other national services.


We are aware many of our contractors find the claiming process complex and time consuming, however, please may we remind you that appropriate clinical records must be kept by the contractor, within the patient medication record (PMR) system or other appropriate record, for all stages of the service provided.


Maintaining the records electronically via PharmOutcomes is the ideal approach, although it is possible to provide the service using a combination of annotation of the patient’s PMR and the use of paper records. 

Community Pharmacy England (CPE) has developed a DMS Worksheet which can be used to maintain clinical records for the service and collate the summary data. Using this worksheet and annotating the patient’s PMR, so all staff know they have had a DMS referral, will allow the service to be provided in line with the contractual requirements, where IT system functionality is not available to the pharmacy.


DMS Worksheet V1 (Microsoft Word)

DMS Worksheet V1 (PDF)


This document summarises the actions to be taken at the three stages of the service DMS Activity Summary.


Additionally, from the clinical records maintained by the contractorsummary data on each DMS provided has to be provided as part of the payment claim for the service. This data will support the evaluation of the impact of the service, contract monitoring and post-payment verification. 

Clinical records of the service should be kept for a minimum of 2 years after the service has taken place. You should determine the appropriate length of time to keep the record, and this should be captured in your SOP.


If contractors use the CPE DMS Worksheet to make clinical records for the service, you will also be recording all the information that you will need to add to MYS, when the service is complete, and you make your claim. The DMS Summary Information has to be reported to the NHSBSA as part of your claim via the MYS portal. This data will help demonstrate the impact of the service and it will be used by the NHS in its evaluation of the DMS. The data will trigger the payment to the contractor for provision of the service.


Please also note: Trusts will only be aware you have carried out and completed the service if this is done via PharmOutcomes. This visibility will give the Trusts more confidence in the service and encourage further referrals in the future.


We are still awaiting news on an API for DMS, once this is in place pharmacy owners providing the services will need to use an approved pharmacy clinical IT system to keep their clinical records for the services and to submit data on the provision of the service and payment claims to MYS. At that time, the current manual MYS claim processes for the services will be retired.


Kind regards,

CPWY


Community Pharmacy West Yorkshire

www.cpwy.org

info@cpwy.org

0113 272 7560