A TIP TO REDUCE POTENTIAL ERRORS FOR THE PHARMACY
By Jeff Ellis
Our client which uses the Starter Set CPOE system and Siemens’ Pharmacy 23.7 was
having a translation problem with medications orders using the “dose” radio button.
In the gold form, GHMDEO02, the user has the ability to select the number of doses radio button
and key in a numeric value. Unfortunately, this number of doses field is not a direct
interface to the Siemens Pharmacy system (which has its own radio button) but rather a way to
generate the stop date and stop time for the reviewed pharmacy order.
This was causing the Pharmacy department occasionally to remove a dose when the order was
validated on the pharmacy system.
After discussing our options with Pharmacy department, we decided the best thing to do was
to use the first additional directions field to hold an automatically generated text literal if
the number of doses radio button was selected The format of the text is: “x nth doses,
where nth is the number of keyed dose from the gold form.
We also had to create a series of tcls to “shuffle down” the additional
directions fields for any pre existing or keyed in comments. So the tcls, would remap any
existing or entered directions to the next available direction field. We had to use all of
the six additional directions fields and the interfaced field, “3rxcmnt1”.
If the user was to revise the order or review the order from the pre-confirmation gold form,
we create another series of tcls to shuffle back up the comments. The idea was to generate the
comment if the button was used but never allow the user to alter the comment.
The end result is the pharmacy department would receive the “x nth doses”
directions and they could manually adjust the order prior to validation.