SPOT - The Safer Prescription of Opioids Tool is a novel digital health platform, distributed as software as a service, which is proven to significantly improve the confidence of opioid prescribing and adherence to best practice guidelines. SPOT has been featured by the BBC and is one of SDI's top 12 Digital Health innovations to watch in 2020\. SPOT has been included in the Scottish Government's Coronavirus 19 palliative care response toolkit. Following a recent IUK project, SPOT has partnered with a UK and European-based professional publishing distributor, Class Professional Publishing. As of April 2021, SPOT is now available Europe-wide on their Salesforce platform, complemented with first-line sales and technical support. Building on specific contacts engendered over the last two years, our progress in the UK and European markets, and an increase in momentum for digital health from the COVID-19 pandemic, we seek to carry out a feasibility study with potential commercial partners in the USA who have already expressed interest in SPOT.

SPOT, The Safer Prescription of Opioids Tool, supports prescribers when relieving pain at the end-of-life. It has been featured in the BBC on TV and online, and it is currently in use in NHS Borders to support palliative care of patients. The COVID19 pandemic is creating an increased demand for drugs (known as Opioids) that relieve pain at the end of life. This increased demand is in turn causing shortages of the first-line choices available for these drugs. At the same time, doctors and nurses are being redeployed to work in unfamiliar environments and undertake new roles including an increasing amount of prescribing of opioids for pain and palliative care. This puts the patients, and the doctors and nurses at risk of harm. There is a potential risk that prescribing these unfamiliar medicines in a new setting leads to an increased likelihood of overdosing a patient causing respiratory depression and possible death, or under-dosing the patient and the patient suffering. We know that SPOT supports prescribers in using these medicines safely and that it has a role in reducing the risk to patients of harm. The aim of this project is to make SPOT available to all prescribers in the UK on a free-to-use basis for the duration of the COVID19 pandemic and analyse the prescribing data to make sure that SPOT can best support doctors and nurses when they prescribe these vital drugs. We will approve SPOT for the FDA to export SPOT overseas and seek partnership with organisations in the USA and UK.

"A number of strong painkillers, morphine derivatives, are used in the management of patients with cancer pain. Intolerance to these drugs or side effects involves switching to another type of drug, or route of administration. Converting from one painkiller to another requires care and is presently performed using paper tables of approximate equivalence. The Safer Prescription of Opioids Tool, (SPOT) double checks such drug conversions, reducing the potential of harm to the patient, and costs to the NHS."