Question: What is the minimum work required in Connect Care (where it is the record of care) when a pharmacy requests a prescription renewal/refill?
Context: Busy outpatient physicians may receive faxed prescription refill requests from pharmacists serving the physician's patients. The legacy convenience was to simply sign and return the pharmacy fax.
Now that Connect Care is the legal record of care, physicians new to Connect Care suffer significant information burdens if the pharmacy request is taken as a trigger to enter all meds (for a patient not yet seen in Connect Care), generate a new prescription, print, sign, scan and fax back to the pharmacy.
Unfortunately, ePrescription is not yet available in Alberta.
Answer: An acceptable interim workflow is to sign and fax back the pharmacy-provided refill request. The prescriber can then enter just those meds to the patient chart, to document the prescribing action. An additional printout does not have to be generated from Connect Care. Later, when the patient appears for an appointment, a full list of home medications can be generated and validated.
The key is that Connect Care, as record of care, must be used to document prescription activities.
Once over a transition period, charts will be more complete and refill workflows from within Connect Care will prove the fastest way to get things done.