Huge news for those Pharmacies who use Fred Dispense!
The Fred IT group has released a new PCEHR enabled version of their software. . This will hopefully encourage other pharmacies to sign up as the useful software will now be available for their use.
McDonald (2013) explains that this update provides Fred equipped Pharmacies with the ability to send information through the eRx and the National Prescription and Dispense Repository (NPDR), which is due to do live this week. Further, the NPDR and the PCEHR are estimated to be able to talk to each other before the end of the month which is great news for those Pharmacies who are currently registered for the PCEHR. What a huge step toward paperless prescriptions and something that most people do not think about, a huge step forward for the environmentally-friendliness of this Profession!
We can hope that this will encourage Pharamcists to begin promoting ehealth to their customers and patients and advising them to sign themselves, or even receive help from the Pharmacist to be signed up for their own PCEHR. Pharmacists will be integral to the uptake and application of this program as they can identify and counsel those who would most benefit from having an ehealth record, such as parents of small children, the elderly and those with chronic illnesses about the benefits, also provide a helping hand in signing up for the program. It would be great to see a greater uptake of PCEHR when the NPDR and PCEHR are both live and able to communicate with one another.
These are exciting times for ehealth in Australia and one can only hope that these new software updates provide a platform in which Pharmacists can lead the way in promoting eHealth in Australia to ensure a more cohesive 21st Century healthcare system.
REFERNCE
McDonald, K., (2013) Pharmacies ready for NPDR as PCEHR v3 nears. PusleITMagazine. accessed from http://www.pulseitmagazine.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1420:pharmacies-ready-for-npdr-as-pcehr-v3-nears&catid=16:australian-ehealth&Itemid=327 on 09/05/13
E-Health Blog 2013 
What great news!! Unfortunately the pharmacy I work at does not use Fred dispense so I won’t be able to check this out just yet but hopefully there will be similar advances for other dispense software very soon!
One of the other software companies has apparently bought out their own version as well..Simple Retail that runs the Aquarius dispense software. I dont know how widely used this software is though. Nice to see that this is happening though, and the more software that becomes PCEHR enabled, the more people that can be signed up and receive the benefits of ehealth…at least this is my hope!