[Revised Oct 2000]
The pricing office requires dose/frequency to calculate days-of-supply. For some scripts this is not available, E.g. "Apply tds" has no dose and "Take TWO prn" has no frequency.
Dose/Frequency are used for statistical and audit purposes and do not affect the pay out.
RxOne 'learns' to extract dose/frequency
If RxOne is not sure what the dose/frequency is it will pop up a box and ask ONCE. Once, because it then learns and will automatically put in the dose/frequency next time is sees that instruction so this is a short term process as you teach it. It will continue to ask on repeats until they work through the system.
It knows that prn and similar instructions, or drugs like eye drops, do not need the dose/frequency question asked, so it is greyed out in those cases.
Dose & Freq
RxOne automatically takes the numbers off the raw 'sig' before translation.
Misinterpretation can arise if the unit of dose for the patient is different from the unit for the pricing office, E.g. "1 teaspoonful mane" has a dose of '1' but the pricing office requires '7g'.
Enter this as "7g (one teaspoonful) mane" so that it will advise a dose of '7g' to the pricing office, and the patient has both the technically correct, and common language, doses. If this happens often, define a new sig "tsp" = "Take 7g (one teaspoonful" and use that to save time.
[Added Apr 2014]
Claim Error 138 – what to do?
The “Error 138: Items supplied for more than 90 days over all dispensing” is a dose and frequency error.
MoH/HealthPAC uses these values as a check to see whether a pharmacy have over dispensed or not.
For example:
- The dose and frequency is set as 1,2 i.e. average/total daily dose as 2x1=2ml.
- Maximum period of supply for a script can be up to 3 months.
- So according to the dose and frequency, MoH thinks the maximum they are allowed is 2mlx90days= 180ml.
- They are dispensing 200ml so MoH says they've exceeded the amount allowed for 90days with the dose and frequency they have given.
The fix is usually to put in the a right dose frequency e.g.
a) if instruction is: “10ml bd” then it will be dose of 10 and frequency of 2 ;
b) if instruction is 5ml in the morning and 10ml at night, the average daily dose =15ml. They can put in dose=15 and freq =1 or dose =1 and freq= 15 Doesn't matter which way round.
c) Or if dose is changing i.e. increasing or decreasing doses or
d) where it’s too hard to work out the average daily dose e.g. patches: one patch every week or
e) where the dose is unknown (for c,d,e) they can put “as directed” at the end of the instruction e.g. “______ml twice daily until finished as directed”.
This will switch off the dose and frequency check at MoH end. (Note: Toniq users knows it as changing the dose and frequency to 0,0).
Note they shouldn't put in “and as directed” as this will change the meaning of the instructions. It should just be ‘as directed’ as this does not change the intent of the instructions.
(More info for you: RxOne tries to automatically work out the dose and frequency by looking at the instructions for anything to do with numbers. Users can overwrite this. Or add ‘as directed at end of instructions for it to turn off the dose and frequency. If the instructions has prn (when required) in it, it will also switch off the MoH check on the dose and frequency).
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