Thoughts to implement usecase related to medication - subset of medicines prescribed are available in pharmacy

I have an use case, there is a pharmacy but all types of medicines are not available. Only some subset of medicines are sold as part of pharmacy. However doctor prescribes other medicines too.

In Bahmni, if we create them as part of concept drugs, an item gets automatically created in openerp. If the doctor prescribes, the order gets created automatically.

In this use case, we do not want all medicines are being created as part of inventory in openerp. we wanted selective to be created as part of openerp, rest should be available in Bahmni for prescription. similarly for orders, not every prescription order lines are created in opener. we dont want to remove sync , as we want to avoid duplication of manually entry in Bahmni and opener.

One of you might have experienced similar use case, could you please let us know how you have implemented this usecase or any thoughts how this can be implemented.

This sounds like a “formulary” use case. A formulary is a subset of a medication catalog which are available in a particular pharmacy. There can also be specific subsets of medications which are available under certain insurance payment systems, or certain delivery networks. You want to be able to have the base medication information (names, dosages, standard codes, etc.) come from a master, curated dictionary, but the subset needs to be managed locally. That might also include local price information… Try searching for “formulary”.

Thanks Andrew for your response. It’s not exactly formulary.

Let’s take this example: There are several thousands medicines and brands available in the market. The doctor may choose to prescribe certain medicines (which will be manually created as part of concept drug) and out of which some are made available and sold through their Pharmacy.

In Bahmni, to prescribe any medication we need to create them as part of concept dictionary right and the atomfeed will automatically create inventory item for every medicine created as concept drug and order lines for every prescribed medication. In the usecase, we wanted only selective concept drug (those available in pharmacy) - to be part of inventory and orderliness while other drugs should not get sync.

Wanted to know, how this has been implemented in other implementations. I guess this should be a very common usecase. As every medicine need not necessarily be made available in Pharmacy.

We’ve discussed adding drug formulary support into the platform, knowing that it would be needed eventually. Just haven’t gotten someone or an org to implement it yet.

I guess this is on openmrs, how this feature would reflect in Bahmni and integrated into it, as we are largely looking at Bahmni.

is there any user guide around this?

@jayasri the ticket that Burke mentioned is not actually supported in the underlying OpenMRS API yet either, it’s a a requested future feature there.

Perhaps someone with more Bahmni implementation experience knows a way to configure this with the current code. If not, it would be a new product enhancement (e.g. using concept attributes to indicate whether or not to sync).

I think what @jayasri is looking for is rather simple. (please correct me if I am wrong)

  • She wants some drugs to be raised in quotation (that are sold in the pharmacy and those are stocked)
  • there are other drugs, she wants Doctors to prescribe, for which there would be no quotation. but patients can buy them from outside.

Simple answer: We don’t have this feature yet. Simplest bit would be to just leave the stock status for such drugs in ERP to be zero. On quotation, they will be shown in red, and the billing person can just remove them from the quotation.

not so simple answer: This can be built. Follow up on “orderable” discussion in this thread

Thank you for your response Darius and Angshuman.

You are right Angshuman in understanding the usecase.

Simplest solution is not advisable as it wouldn’t be a good user experience. We will have to ensure and recommend minimal steps to end user and avoid confusion to them.

May be with small change like Darius mentioned some flag for those drugs in openmrs, we should be able to stop the sync at atom feed. What do you say? I am not sure if that could be a small one or not…

In my opinion this must be a common usecase.