We have received multiple requests from facilities to change how the Dispensing Instructions section is handled in the prescription form. Currently, clinicians/Doctors are required to fill in this section, but there is a strong preference for pharmacists to handle it during dispensing, based on the prescription details.
Should the dispensing instructions remain mandatory for clinicians, or should pharmacists take over this responsibility?
How can we ensure accurate dispensing calculations without compromising patient safety?
Would an optional dispensing instructions field for clinicians (instead of mandatory) provide flexibility?
You are specifically referring to the quantity to dispense and the refills allowed?
I think at PIH we want to keep this as mandatory in most cases, but I don’t see an issue with making a configuration parameter to control whether it is mandatory or not.
For implementations that set it false and use dispensing, they’d need to set the “restrictTotalQuantityDispensed” config parameter to false (since we can’t restrict if it isn’t specified!) but otherwise I think the Dispensing functionality would work out of the box with this change (and we could likely fix if not).