Community Patient Rx Cycles: Remind prescribers to issue New Rxs in a timely manner

Where Community patients have had their medicines synchronised for dispensing in prescription cycles, making sure a new Rx is available after repeats have run out is often difficult.   This report may help pharmacy manage community cycle patients who don’t have Tel Rx signing permission.

Run the 'Cycles needing New Rxs' report

This report can be run for a prescriber group (medical centre) or a specific prescriber.  It will report the patients and the details of their dispensing.   Patients needing new Rxs are selected by the number of repeats they have left (if any) on current prescriptions.   It can be used for monthly and/or weekly dispensing cycles.  It is best run at the end of each cycle.

Running the report

From main menu: 

• 5. Dosepack
• 5. Reports
• 7. Special Use Reports
• 5. Cycle patients needing new Rxs

The report can be run for a set number of repeats – or fewer.  Useful to select both for weekly dispensing where more than 1 week’s notice is needed and where the patient actually has no remaining repeats.

What to do with the report

If run to printer it can be faxed to the medical centre.   If it is to be emailed then it may need to be run for each prescriber so that an individual file is created, this depends on how the medical centre want it to be received.  The file can be sent as an attachment in the pharmacy email system OR it can be done from the Contacts menu in Dispensary.

NB:  The report does contain patient names.  The pharmacy should check that by sending the report by email it does not breach patient privacy.  The MOH has recently issued some advice around this. 

As the new Rx’s are received they can be processed/scanned as Held items.  Two processing options exist for when packs are next due. New Tel Rxs can be generated in the cycle and the audit screen used to receive those where matching held rxs exist and identify those that don’t.  Alternatively Rxs can be manually unheld, and packs manually update and printed/packed etc. In this case the cycle is used only for generating repeats.