We are seeking your input on this pull request, which proposes enabling future dates when placing medication orders in the patient chart.
The idea is to allow providers to schedule medications that are intended to start at a future date. For example, a clinician might want to prescribe a drug that starts after the completion of an existing regimen.
We’d greatly appreciate your guidance on the following points:
Are there any clinical or implementation concerns with allowing medication orders to have a future start date?
Should the system support this as a configurable option?
How should the dispensing process treat medications with future start dates? Should they be available for dispensing immediately or only on/after the scheduled start date?
Has anyone implemented a similar support in their OpenMRS setup? If so, what considerations came up?
Hi @veronica, thanks for bringing this up here. In my opinion, it might be helpful to make the start date and time optional but configurable, just in case someone needs to set it for a future time. For example, in a hospital setting, a clinician might want a patient to start medication tomorrow afternoon or after a certain procedure. It’s just a small thought, but I feel it could add some flexibility for those who need it, while still keeping things simple for everyone else.
So I vote for having the future start date for dispensing.
Along with it, we also need to figure out the tapering dose prescribed to the patient. example:
Tab Prednisolone 5 mg Oral Two time a day for 5 days
Then
Tab Prednisone 2.5 mg Oral Two time a day for 5 days
Then
Tab Prednisone 2.5 mg Oral once daily for 5 days
Then Stop.
I don’t see an issue with allowing orders with a future start date. Doesn’t seem like the sort of thing we should prevent people from doing. That said, how this relates to dispensing is difficult. Without a proper set of rules to implement, the safest option seems to be to just make it available for dispensing and rely on the pharmacist for the legal implications (maybe with some kind of visual cue that the order is not for today). I suspect the real answer is very highly dependent on the drug in question, the amount of time the order is in advance for, etc.