We’ve encountered a challenge in the system where patients who come early for their medication especially in programs like HIV care—are unable to get a new prescription if their current prescription is still active. This restriction creates barriers for patients who need to pick up their medication in advance due to travel, work schedules, or other personal reasons.
Here is where the check happens Link
How should we approach this scenarios ? Do we need to relax this rule?
We have encountered scenarios where patients lose medication from a variety of reasons and they are not able to raise new prescriptions since they are deemed to still be having active prescriptions. This hinders them from raising new prescriptions and its a real problem. I support relaxing this rule. Thanks @kmakombe
That check there is meant as a patient safety thing. The correct sequence is to discontinue the active order and then place the new order. That’s effectively what revising an order (submit an order with the action REVISE and a link to the existing order) does.
Thanks @ibacher for the feedback. Currently in o3 if you go to active medication tab and discontinue the medication and try to do another order of the same drug, its not possible. The button is disabled with a label “Already prescribed” hence one is not able to put another order
That’s pretty clearly a bug that should be addressed. More in favour of fixing whatever is marking that as being already prescribed rather than trying to do something with the check in the backend validator (which I think remains valid).
The work around provided for this where users are requested to cancel or modify previous prescriptions might raise medical legal issues. Prescriptions and dispenses are legal documents that should not be altered without a legal backing. Consider relaxing the validation on this.
