Some patients have been asking about emailing us their repeat prescription requests.
Unfortunately we don't currently support this for lots of reasons (it is more likely to go astray, it is less secure, and there are more chances of a mistake with the prescription).
There is software that allows patients to make appointments and order repeat prescriptions online, but our current clinical computer system (GPASS) is not really up to the job.
We are in the process of requesting a new clinical computer system from the Health Board. As always, this will take a long time (and probably lots of meetings with people in suits) to arrange. Once we have this new system, we will be able to set up a secure online ordering system.
In the meantime, I apologise to anyone who is disappointed that we don't yet have email/internet ordering.
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
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6 comments:
Pleased to hear that you're investigating it. Trouble for us (at the far reaches of your footprint) is we have no fax to request therefore we have a 26 mile round trip specially to hand in the repeat request (you don't like the requests by 'phone understandably as an emergency may be coming in), then a further 26 mile round trip to collect the prescription when it's ready. Would also be useful (and save us a lot of fuel and associated costs) if we could possibly order more than one months worth of medication at a time too. Really good to hear that things are moving in the right direction though.
In the mean time, if you find it difficult to order your repeat prescriptions by post/fax/in person, then speak to Liz in the dispensary about the possibility of ordering your next month's medications when you collect your medication.
As regards issuing more than one month of medication at a time. Unfortunately, our dispensing budget is linked to our prescribing interval. If we moved to two-month dispensing we would lose around £12,000 a year from the dispensary budget.
Monthly prescribing is also thought to be slightly cheaper for the NHS as there is less waste when medications are changed and/or stopped and is NHS Scotland's preferred policy.
Appreciate that this may take a while, but just wondering if there may be any progress as of yet?
Yes,
We are having a demonstration of the EMIS clinical system which we are looking at switching to.
Unfortunately, it is quite expensive and the Health Board are currently unwilling to fund it as there is a review of Scottish clinical systems.
So we are in limbo just now waiting for the NHS to decide which direction clinical software is going to take in Scotland.
Any further development on this?
No, we are still waiting for the funding decision by NHS Highland for the new electronic medical record (EMR) that will replace the now defunct GPASS.
Until the funding arrives, we can't upgrade our EMR to the one with the email prescriptions feature.
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