Bespoke PICS

PICS, the Prescribing, Information and Communication System, is University Hospitals Birmingham's internally developed electronic patient record. First created in 1999 and continuously refined with clinicians, it combines clinical documentation, electronic prescribing, order communication and rules-based decision support. PICS can relate medicines to pathology results and physiological observations, generating alerts and workflow messages within the patient record. It supports simultaneous access by multiple clinicians and uses time markers to highlight patients awaiting assessment or progression. UHB identifies it as the EHR for inpatient, outpatient, intensive-care and virtual-ward activity, and has deployed it across most wards and clinical areas. The system has also been adopted by other Birmingham NHS organisations.