Royston, February 4th 2013 – Northwick ParkHospital, part of the North West London Hospitals NHS Trust is relying on the Ultimate™ labelling solution from Episys, the global information technology solutions and services company, to manage the labelling on all drugs used for clinical trials, and in so doing, cut management time and control errors.

Theo Emmanuel, Senior Clinical Trials Pharmacist at Northwick ParkHospital, said, “We have been a customer of Episys for a while now and are using the system to assist us with the printing of labels for all the clinical trials we run here at Northwick Park. We have also recently started using the system to print labels for work carried out under our MIA (IMP) Licence. The ability to design labels that meet the correct regulation requirements is key to us and any clinical trial service. The labels are easy to design and we have much more freedom in terms of what we want to include on the label. The system provides us with a blank canvas.”

Theo continued, “What’s great about the Episys system is that is allows us to ensure that labels comply with the high standards set by the MHRA. From a manufacturing perspective a trial can involve thousands of IMP doses so printing labels used to be costly and designing labels time consuming. Ultimate™ saves us time, helps us to keep errors down and helps save money on re-prints. The old system was not fully controlled and was open to mistakes. We are very happy with the system and in the future may look to add colour and barcodes to our labels, something the system can also manage.”  

The Ultimate™ software generates the clinical trial databases used to define the relationship between patients and treatments and includes a filter system that allows selected subsets of the clinical trial database to be copied to separate database tables. The system creates a new ‘trial’ based on a name supplied by the user. Information on the trial can be entered including the drug name and dosage for each drug, and the centre and number of patients for each trial centre. Additional information can then be inputted including the trial type, trial balancing, base patient number, number of visits per drug, whether to keep the patient sequence across centres and the blocking multiplier.

Derek Buchanan, Chief Executive Officer at Episys, said, “The success or otherwise of a drug trial depends heavily on accuracy of the labelling and distribution of component drugs and then the data that results from it. Ultimate™ is simply there to make the process accurate, quick and error-free.”

About Northwick Park Hospital
The Trust hospitals are located on two sites, with Northwick Park and St Mark’s Hospital in Harrow and Central Middlesex Hospital in Park Royal.  The Trust employs over 4,000 staff and is the major health care provider in North West London with over 900 beds on the two sites. The pharmacy departments offer comprehensive pharmaceutical services to all areas of the organisation. The Northwick Park pharmacy department has two large manufacturing units, both of which are licensed by the MHRA.  The units produce a wide range of ‘specials’ including terminally sterilised small volume injections, a wide range of non-sterile preparations, pre-packs and has a large commitment to TPN and cytotoxics.  After a major refurbishment and expansion program of the manufacturing units there is now a new clinical trials facility and the site now holds an MIA(IMP) for manufacturing IMP products.

About Episys Limited
Episys is a global information technology solutions and services company to the retail, manufacturing, logistics, chemical, healthcare and public service sector industries. We provide expertise, products, services and support for signage, labeling and mobile systems.

Episys works with strategic business partners worldwide and with a range of leading technology manufacturers, enabling us to provide solutions to meet each unique business need - from integrated signage systems for major worldwide retailers to specialist labels for food manufacturing.

Our Healthcare Clients include Bio Products Laboratory, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol Royal Infirmary, Calea, GlaxoSmithKline, Guys & St Thomas Hospital NHS Trust, Mundipharma Research, Reckitt Benckiser Healthcare, Roche, Royal Free Hospital, St George's Healthcare NHS Trust, and Worthing and Southlands Hospitals NHS Trust.

www.episys.com

Further information (external website)