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eRx Script Exchange investigates, does the Melbourne Cup really stop the nation?

eRx Script Exchange today released data on the number of scripts processed during the 2016 Melbourne Cup, showing more than a 50% drop in script traffic compared with a standard Tuesday afternoon.
Between 3:00pm and 3.10, when the Cup ran, the total number of scripts prescribed and dispensed across the country dropped by 50%, from a peak of 4,569 per minute to a low of 2,584 per minute during the race.
Compared with the week prior to Cup Day, Cup Day saw a 44%-52% drop in total traffic sent to the exchange in the ten minutes from 3.00-3.10 pm.

With Pharmacy approaching its two busiest months of the year for prescriptions, the number of doctors and pharmacies using eRx continues to grow.

In preparation, eRx recently carried out network improvements to ensure that the speed of eRx remains fast. So when the horses aren’t running and the pace in your pharmacy quickens, eRx will continue to provide efficiencies for your dispensing.

eRx Script Exchange transfers prescription information between doctors and pharmacies. It is used by more than 20,000 doctors and 4,700 pharmacies every day and transfers more than 90% of the nation’s prescriptions.

Click here to view the full media release

One of the key problems facing Australian health care professionals continues to be the lack of consolidated medications information and an inability to easily share information between health professionals. When patients move between community care and hospital and aged care, the absence of good quality and up to date clinical data can contribute to these interactions becoming high risk, resulting in medication misadventures and unnecessary hospital readmissions.

Medications reconciliation remains a largely manual process throughout Australia, providing a glaring reminder of the implications around the lack of shared clinical data on patient welfare. Thankfully, technology advances are making significant inroads into this problem, with the development of new applications such as the MedView Medicines Workspace.

The MedView Medicines Workspace is an update on the original MedView pilot which took place in the Barwon Region of Victoria. The pilot tackled the problem around the lack of visibility of clinical data between different sectors, drawing together medication information from healthcare professionals in community, hospital and aged care settings. As a result and in an Australian first, health professionals who took part in the trial were able to see a combined list of patients’ prescribed and dispensed medications from across all of these settings.

The pilot found that the sharing of clinical data, with patient consent, resulted in better medications management and safer outcomes for patients. MedView demonstrated the capacity of web applications to draw on data captured by existing systems, especially eRx Script Exchange, as a way of delivering extra value for health users and health professionals.

In community pharmacy and GP clinics, it is not uncommon to see patients who are confused about what medications they should be taking according to their discharge summary. The MedView Medicines Workspace will help alleviate this problem by allowing doctors, pharmacists, hospitals, aged care settings and patients to have shared access to critical medicines information and services.

With MedView Medicines Workspace, authorised health care providers will be able to view hospital data and pharmacy data at the same time, regardless of whether they are in My Health Record (MyHR) or MedView. They can then curate the data into a reconciled list, which can also be verified with additional input from the patient. Should the patient then present at a hospital or clinic, the clinician can view the reconciled list, complete with details on who curated the list and when, enabling a well-informed discussion with the patient about their medication.

The MedView pilot was focused solely on providing a consolidated list of all prescribed and dispensed medications of a patient for practitioners to see. This was a significant achievement in itself, however there was no capacity to interact directly with the data provided and improve the quality of the information held.

Four years on and taking it a step further, the new MedView Medicines Workspace will be a hub for authorised third parties to integrate with and deliver additional medications management services such as, medications reconciliation, medications monitoring and compliance monitoring - allowing clinicians to contribute data back to MyHR.

The original MedView provided a consolidated medications list of prescribe and dispense events. The new MedView will provide services on top which will help drive meaningful use of MyHR data.

With the launch of MedView Medications Workspace on the horizon, we will be in a stronger position to ensure that the right health care professionals are able to see the right information at the right time. Above and beyond this, doctors, pharmacists and other clinicians will also be able to contribute to shared records, both within the workspace and in MyHR. Not only can this help to ease the burden of misadventure and unnecessary hospital readmissions, but it also has real potential to drive the meaningful use of MyHR.

The key, as an industry, is to concentrate on bridging these information gaps to provide optimal care for patients. The ideal of one clear and perfect complete source of medications data is still a way off, however we must concentrate our efforts on how we can better work together as an industry to use data that is already being captured through systems such as electronic prescribing and dispensing. In this view, MedView Medicines Workspace and MyHR are not competing, but rather are complementary ways of building up clinical data at some of the high risk intersections between care settings.

It goes without saying that any such understanding needs to be based on the view that data is only shared with consent, and that it is dealt with sensitively and with a view to improving health outcomes rather than commercial outcomes.

The MedView Medicines Workspace is a prime example of how thinking creatively and applying innovation can deliver real life-saving potential and immediate practical value to the entire health sector.

Pharmacy software specialist Fred IT will try out the first phase of its new MedView Medicines Workspace during the later stages of the Northern Queensland trial for the opt-out model of the My Health Record.

First announced at the Australian Pharmacy Professional (APP) conference on the Gold Coast earlier this month, Fred's MedView Medicines Workspace will eventually allow doctors, pharmacists, hospitals and patients to have shared access to critical medicines information and services.

Fred IT CEO Paul Naismith said the web application would initially provide a medicines reconciliation function particularly aimed at pharmacists but would grow to allow all authorised health professionals to have a single patient view of the different sources of medication knowledge, and then provide a medication services on top of that.

To read the full article please visit Pulse IT Magazine

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What our customers think

  • “eRx allows my practitioners to send prescriptions electronically directly to the patient, so they instantly have their prescription. It saves admin time faxing and posting, and allows us more time to focus on helping our patients.”
    – Char MacDonald - Abermain Surgery and NSW/ACT AAPM Committee Member
  • “We love using eRx. It’s great when those barcodes come through, scanning them makes dispensing so much easier. eRx improves patient safety by reducing transcription errors which is important to us.”
    – Alex Keipert - Pharmacy Owner - Mudgee NSW
  • “I commend eRx and ePrescriptions, as it has reduced my workload of printing a minimum of over 100 scripts every week, in addition to having to sign each script twice and having to handwrite the details of the S8 scripts. Also the Real Time Prescription Monitoring (RTPM) has helped in checking the status with restricted scripts.”
    – Dr Mario Fernando - Principal GP at Lima Medical Pty Ltd, Bendigo VIC
  • “Just a note to tell you how happy I am with eRx and ePrescriptions. When I scan prescriptions all the information is immediately there and it saves so much time. Also, ctg scripts are caught, (which often get missed as I notice from repeats we get from other pharmacies), which allows us to provide a more efficient service to our customers.”
    – Glenna Hinschen - Proserpine Pharmacy

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