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For all your patients who are taking prescriptions from their physicians, you only have to look up a particular medication once. Then it goes into the database and you can link to it for any patient, increasing efficiency and quality of care. Once you get the commonly used drugs entered in, you will find your efficiency increasing dramatically. You can access the medications list from the Main Menu under Lists | Medications or from within the Medical / Service Notes section where the medications are attached to patients.
The medications on the list above are a mixture of Generic and Brand name, all organized alphabetically. If you double click on an existing medication, or click Add, the following window will come up:
In the example above, the medication being entered is not generic. You would have to enter the generic medication first, and then you will be able to enter other medications which share the same generic name. Notes are only allowed on the generic medication, and all other medications attached to that generic will show the same note.
When you start using this feature, you will find that there are a LOT of medications that you were probably not tracking as thoroughly as you should have. Entering in the medications will take a little extra time at first until you get a routine established and you get the common medications entered. It helps to divide the task among the assistants and the doctor. The assistants can look up the medication, ensure that the spelling is absolutely correct, and enter the generic and brand names. But they should not enter in any notes. The notes should be entered by the doctor. The note will usually consist of the therapeutic category, and any precautions or interactions to be aware of. Distilling this information down to a few words is not something the assistants have been trained to do. Every medication should have a note no matter how short so that it can be seen that the doctor did at least look up the medication and check for precautions. For this reason, any generic medication that is missing a note is flagged with a star in the medications list, signifying that it needs to be looked up ASAP.