Drug names and prescriptions

cfapress wrote on Friday, May 09, 2008:

Our Agency has two psychiatrists about 15 nurses who are allowed to prescribe drugs. We’re not a dispensary so using the ‘drugs’ table to keep track of an inventory doesn’t make sense. But it seems to me that having a list of drug names would be beneficial and help to prevent typos when writing a prescription.

Does anyone have thoughts about using the ‘drugs’ table as a look-up table?

I thought I’d work on making a type-ahead feature in the prescriptions so when a doctor is entering a prescription they are presented with choices matching what they’ve typed. They could then choose from the list or just keep typing whatever they were.

Here in the USA I found a pretty complete list of drugs and trade names at the FDAs web site.
http://www.fda.gov/cder/orange/obreadme.htm

How are other places doing prescriptions and what features would make OpenEMR better in this area?

Jason

cfapress wrote on Friday, May 09, 2008:

More thinking on my part…

The Drug Lookup button has been broken for some time again. After some looking it appears that RXList changed how they returned their values. I’ve corrected the code on my machine for testing.

What is the purpose of the Drug Lookup button?

Is it a spell checker of sorts?
Is it to look up generic names of drugs?
Something else?

It seems to me, and I’m hardly a doctor, that a button to look up details about a drug would be just as helpful. Maybe more? If we had a complete list of drug names from the FDA already included in OpenEMR would that override the need for a ‘drug lookup’ button?

These are just thoughts and musing. I hope real doctors can chime in here.
Jason

markleeds wrote on Friday, May 09, 2008:

I have a very efficient and effective way for looking up drugs and printing prescriptions.  I use it every day.  I have described it multiple times in this forum whenever the topic comes up.  Possibly I did not explain it well or it does not work for others.  If I have time, I am planning to work on a video tutorial for youtube.  I have tried doing this, but it is trickier than I thought it would be.

rayaz wrote on Saturday, June 21, 2008:

Could you please point me the posts?
TIA