Touchdose: Precision prescribing for a safer NHS
Find out how Touchdose is driving safer, more accurate prescribing, and what being a Fellow means to them.
Co-founded by Nicholas Appelbaum, Touchdose aims to make precision easier than error, and to set a new standard for national prescribing safety.
What is Touchdose and what problem does it solve?
Touchdose is a clinical decision support tool that embeds the British National Formulary (BNF) directly into prescribing workflows. Instead of relying on clinicians to manually recall complex dosing rules, Touchdose surfaces condition-specific, age-specific, and weight-based dosing guidance at the exact moment a prescription is made.
Medication errors remain one of the most preventable sources of harm in the NHS. Current systems alert clinicians after an unsafe prescription has already been entered, a fundamentally flawed model that has failed to deliver meaningful improvements in safety. Touchdose reverses this paradigm, guiding clinicians to the right dose before an order is signed.
“We’re replacing ‘alert after error’ with real, proactive safety at the point of care.”
“We’re replacing ‘alert after error’ with real, proactive safety at the point of care.”
What was your inspiration and motivation?
The inspiration for Touchdose came from years spent working at the intersection of medicine, technology and patient safety, and from a deep frustration with tools that simply didn’t reflect the realities of clinical work. Prescribing for children, in particular, was a constant source of cognitive load and risk: complex calculations, weight-based adjustments, and a lack of integrated, reliable guidance.
As a doctor, Nicholas Appelbaum initially built an Excel spreadsheet to check dosing accuracy. That small workaround revealed a much bigger truth, the system was placing impossible expectations on clinicians. Subsequent PhD research confirmed the scale of the problem showing that up to 30% of drug administrations in simulations involved an error, and 96% of critical mistakes went undetected in real-world settings.
“I’m motivated to make precision easier than error, because no clinician should be forced to rely on memory for patient safety.”
Nicholas Appelbaum, Co-Founder and CEO, Dosium
Why did you become a Fellow?
For Touchdose, the NHS Innovation Accelerator (NIA) provides access to a community that understands the realities of innovating within the NHS: the complexity, the barriers, and the perseverance required to scale meaningful change. It creates space for honest conversations and shared problem-solving among people who have navigated similar challenges.
It also brings legitimacy. Being recognised as an NIA innovation signals that patient-specific prescribing is not a fringe idea, but an essential component of the national digital health agenda.
“The NIA is where people understand both the system and the struggle, and where innovation becomes a shared endeavour.”
Looking ahead
The ambition is to see patient-specific, condition-specific prescribing become the new standard across the NHS. That means unifying local formularies with the BNF and integrating this intelligence seamlessly into electronic prescribing systems.
For Dosium, it means becoming the infrastructure that underpins safer prescribing nationally, ensuring every clinician has access to accurate, automated dosing guidance at the moment they need it.
“Our goal is national adoption: every prescription, every patient, every time.”
Want to find out more? Visit the innovation page where you can contact the innovator directly, or check out their website.
