National prescription tracking service for patients

The national prescription tracking service for patients is a new part of the Electronic Prescription Service (EPS). It allows patients to access consistent information about their prescriptions online and track the status and readiness of their prescribed items. 

The service aims to: 

• give more visibility of the prescription journey via the NHS App

• inspire more people to use digital services for ordering and viewing their prescriptions

• remove burden from front line services by reducing common patient prescription queries

• save clinical time that can be spent better elsewhere

The national prescription tracking service collaborates with our EPS assured dispensing supplier partners. Where possible, our design is based on reusing functionality that they already have. This allows us to join up the information for patients on a national scale and level up the digital experience across England.

The new service is enabled by the pharmacy system pushing minimal required information to a new NHS England endpoint. For most dispensing suppliers this will be data that is readily available in their local system. Visit the Prescription Status Update API page for more information.

This information is pushed to a new NHS England data store. The service is triggered by an NHS App user viewing their prescription information in the NHS App via the Prescriptions for Patients API.

Also, we are looking into the use of the NHS Notify service to send a push notification to the NHS App. If used, the user will be informed when their prescription is ready to collect. The notification is intended to link to the digital prescription, offering a seamless end to end app journey.

We have a national feature in the NHS app that allows users to view their digital prescriptions. We are now piloting the ability to track the status of a prescription via the NHS App with a smaller set of users. This is slowly being rolled out nationally as we onboard dispensing suppliers.

Patients can use the NHS App to view prescription details, order repeat prescriptions, and generate a barcode for medication collection. It also allows patients to see the items prescribed, the prescription type, and who the prescribing professional is.

User research with patients tells us that people do not have access to reliable status information about their prescriptions. For this reason, a high number of patients contact their GP surgery or pharmacy for updates on their prescriptions. This creates a poor experience for patients and an increased burden on front line services.

Over 30 million repeat prescriptions are ordered through the NHS App every year. Improving visibility on the prescription journey allows patients to be even more actively involved in their healthcare. We are currently undertaking research with patients and pharmacies to understand the experience this change has had.

Find more information on our core user needs and patient prescription tracking use cases. 

All dispensing suppliers will need to onboard to this service to ensure national coverage of the patient facing tracking service.

To help dispensing suppliers that have not onboarded to this service yet, here are some useful links:

• signed JWT authentication is used for updates that pharmacies send us
• Prescription Status Update API is what dispensers use to send prescription tracking status information

Please contact [email protected] to receive an onboarding pack.

We are currently piloting this service within the NHS App. In the future, we intend to make the Prescriptions for Patients FHIR API available for third parties to implement the service too.

This service went live in September 2024 as a pilot with the following suppliers:

• Apotec 
• Boots 
• Cegedim 
• Invatech

To increase national coverage of the service we will be working with the next set of suppliers, starting with EMIS.

If you have any enquiries relating to the national prescription tracking service for patients, or you are interested in onboarding to this service, please contact [email protected].