Summary: This feature applies to providers or other staff at ambulatory clinics who prescribe.
Prescribe and Dispense structured Signs now include an optional free-text field to record the medication reason. This provides important information to patients.
Highlight changes:
- This field now appears in structured Sigs for prescribe and dispense.
- Reason entry is optional; prescriptions can be sent to pharmacies without entering a medication reason.
- This is a free-text field— enter up to 237 characters, which can include special characters.
Benefit:
Providers can make changes/updates to patients medications without clicking into the patients chart and the information can be accessible to the patient.
Medication reasons in structured Sigs:
Using structured and codified Sigs provides machine-readable messages and are less prone to pharmacy error. Adding medication reason to structured Sigs provides better instructions to patients without needing to document in an unstructured format. Structured Sigs can minimize the risk of adverse drug events from prescribing errors, reduce incidents of incorrect medication dispensing, and lower the risk of patients making medication mistakes.
As a part of athenahealth's initiative to introduce structured Sigs in prescribing and dispensing workflows, a field now appears to optionally capture the intended reason for a prescribed or dispensed medication. The information entered can help patients more easily identify which medications are intended for specific conditions.
Enter a reason for prescribing or dispensing:
Previously, when starting a medication order, fields appeared in the Sig to enter the amount of medication a patient should take over a given duration. However, there was no field to capture the intended reason for a medication.
Now, a field appears after the duration to optionally enter the intended reason for a medication. If a patient has multiple prescriptions for other conditions, this information can help them identify what a specific prescription is meant to address.
- This field now appears in the structured Sig for all medication orders.
- Entry is optional; you are not required to enter the intended reason for a medication.
- Entry is free text — enter up to 237 characters, which can include special characters.