Pharmacies with FRED Dispense ready for eHealth

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

PCEHR-An untapped database of patient medication history?

After choosing to blog on this particular topic of issues around eHealth for Pharmacists, I decided to do a little investigating. I wanted to know what this PERSONALLY controlled electronic health record system was all about. Signing up for the eHealth record was quite easy, all you really need is your medicare card and to have some knowledge of your own personal details…seems reasonable. Once I had registered and looked at my own yet to be populated eHealth record, I was struck by how this system could make the entire healthcare process so much more integrated and efficient, as long as it is widely adopted. The second thing that struck me was a little sidebar of information running down the left side of the record. As the eHealth record seems to be largely administered by Medicare, all of my doctors visits and PBS prescriptions that had been dispensed over the past 3 or so years were there. I believe this to be an untapped resource.

One problem that we still have in our society is a dependence and in some cases an addiction to certain medications. The people who are addicted to these medications sometimes do drastic things to ‘beat’ the system to get them. This includes seeing multiple doctors to get prescriptions for the same items, and having these dispensed at different pharmacies so as not to be detected. Further, at a Pharmacy we only have the medication history of a patient to the extent of the medication that they have had dispensed at our pharmacy. This can prove problematic at times when we do not receive the whole medicinal history of our patients. How does this tie in to electronic health records you may ask?

The information that is collected by Medicare regarding dispensed prescriptions is already providing us with an avenue to cut down the level of medication misuse and abuse, and to gain a more complete medical history of our patients to cater more efficiently to their needs. Currently this information it is not used in this manner by Medicare. All PBS prescriptions which have been dispensed show up on that particular individuals eHealth record. A record that, if widely or universally adopted in Australia would lead to a greater benefit to society as a whole, which would provide pharmacists and other health professionals with an extra tool in their ability to treat patients effectively and provide other forms of therapy if needed.

But now we come back to the main issue for pharmacists and the Ehealth initiative. If the system is purely based on personal choice to opt-in, how will better health outcomes for patients to be reached? Can a system where compliance is not mandatory in an area as pivotal to our society as healthcare truly achieve better outcomes without a complete framework and information database to work with?

Alternatively, is an integrated Electronic Prescription Database (independent of the eHealth initiative at this time), with mandatory membership of all pharmacies a more reasonable answer at this time? The ETP is somewhat attempting to create this with efficient flow of paper-less prescriptions from doctors to pharmacies planned for the future, but is this really integrating our dispensing systems enough? An all encompassing national database would contain the information already collected through medicare and all of the patient records within individual pharmacies which would work together to help strengthen the foundations of conscientious dispensing within this country. We have the technology so why not the initiative? An inter-connected database and transfer of prescription information between all pharmacies nationally is really not all that far-fetched as an idea.