Re: [Gnumed-devel] Prescription printing in arbitrary countries and services.

[J Busser]

At 12:00 AM +0100 5/30/05, Adrian Midgley wrote:
> Looking at the trail and the locktimes on the items prescribed, we would
> see that three items had the same time of locking, and from teh same
> machine with the same user.  It is a reasonable step to take it that
> they were prescribed together, and barely of interest whether they went
> on one sheet of paper or three.

In principle I agree but we can get caught by having to conform to 
(or remain matched to) external agencies.

Presently some jurisdictions require that prescriptions be printed on 
paper that was individualized to the prescriber (name, address etc) 
where, further, each sheet bears a serial number. This is typical for 
controlled substances (narcotics), at least in my province.

For the above, neither faxing nor even printing onto the prescription 
will work, on account of it being a duplicate (2-part) prescription. 
The doctor copy would retain the serial number and so I imagine in 
the EMR you would want (need) to capture that.

For drugs that are not controlled substances, local pharmacies have 
accepted faxed prescriptions, but I have only ever done it having 
hand-signed before putting the fax through. I have not bothered to 
identify the requirements for a computer-signed fax. Someone 
mentioned a requirement to generate some type of prescription 
"number" onto the paper in order to protect against a set of items 
that had only ever been approved *once* by a doctor ending up being 
(printed and) faxed more than once and resulting in an excess supply 
of drug being released.

Should we expect that as we get to electronic prescribing, there will 
be some sort of "transaction" or "authorization" number which, 
depending on the implementation, will apply either to individual 
items in the queue, or will apply in common to whichever items in the 
queue were transmitted during the single connection?