[Health] Prescription Workflow: Hard-coded WHO Drugs Products and Drugs, And Selection Options

[Christoph H. Larsen]

Dear All,

First: Please note that when I talk of "drugs  I mean "medicaments".

Things are getting a wee bit confusing: Take the setting of a hospital
with its own pharmacy that does not do any outside prescriptions.
Therefore, only drugs in the hospital pharmacy can be prescribed for in-
as well as out-patients.

This hospital does not sport all the drugs listed on the WHO List of
Essential Medicines, but has some extra ones not mention in the same
list, hence we have a partial overlap of products and drugs.

There are, however, patents coming in who take drugs prescribed by other
health care providers that are NOT available from the hospital pharmacy,
nor listed on the WHO List of Essential Medicines.

So, in consequence, we have to be able to do two things:

First, we have to RESTRICT the products and drugs presented by the WHO
List of Essential Medicines to what can actually be prescribed inside
the hospital. De-activating a WHO List of Essential Medicines product
does not work in the respect - the product can still be prescribed.

Second, we attending doctor somehow has to be able to add drugs (as
drugs, not products!) to the patient's record, if they come with
third-party medicines not available ta the local hospital pharmacy. This
is often the case, when patients return from reference hospitals, etc.
Unfortunately, the addition of drugs is linked / hard-coded to the
addition of products. However, the attending hospital doctor should have
no write / editing rights to the Product facility.

If we manage to disassociate product and drugs in such a way that
listing medication taken by the patient in the Patients facility does
not require those (possibly externally prescribed) drugs to be a product
(and hence available locally), we would get around the second issue.

For the first issue, deactivation of a product (that is a drug, and the
same is probably true for lab tests, too) should render the drug
associated with it un-prescribe-able.

Evidently, all the above is zero problem in an environment, where the
doctor can prescribe any medication available in the country :-). In
such a case, we just had to enter those drugs as drugs - not even
products, as they wolud not come out of the prescribing doctor's stock
nor account!

Any thoughts?

Bests,

Chris