Archives: Order Stages

Order Placement

Orders are typically placed online through your website and integrated directly into PharmacyWire using our Application Programmer Interface (API). With our extensive documentation provided to developers, your development team can build their website using any web framework. Or, to make the most effective use of your own developers’ time and resources, we have developed a plugin for WordPress to quickly and easily add order processing to your WordPress website.

Your patients can also place orders by calling your call centre and place orders with your customer service team using extensive tools within PharmacyWire for optimal order placement.

Orders can be submitted for multiple patients on the same order, including pets if your pharmacy supports dispensing of pet medications. The customer on the order does not necessarily have to be the patient, and thus can be used by caretakers placing orders for patients directly under their care.

For prescription refills, orders placed can go straight to picking within seconds of being placed.

Prescription Handling

After patients submit their orders, they supply their original prescriptions to the pharmacy. Patients may submit their prescription by fax, email or may upload their prescription during checkout. These prescriptions are transcribed directly into the system from a prescription processing queue. Prescriptions are processed independently of the order as a form of double entry. This helps ensure that orders placed match supplied prescriptions.

Transcription Transcribing

Prescription documents are sent for transcribing by pharmacy technicians. In the transcription process, the technician reviews the original prescription prepared by a doctor or veterinarian and records the prescription instructions, dosage, drug, strength and number of refills for all prescriptions on the supplied documentation.

Once the prescription is validated, the system searches for any orders in the ‘Ordered‘ queue for the customer. If there are any available, it attempts to process the orders on the presumption that the prescription may fill outstanding requirements for the order(s), and if successful, the order can move on to the next queue for appropriate handling.

Medication Check

The first steps of an order are typically handled by call centre staff. Although they will have knowledge of the products being ordered, they do not initially have access to the prescriptions provided by the medical practitioner.

The Medication Check is therefore the first place where the order can be cross-checked by a Pharmacy Technician to ensure that the correct medication and dosages have been ordered. If there are any clarifications required, the technician will contact the patient and or their medical practitioner to clarify the issues and correct either the order or the prescription.

The technician will also verify that sufficient prescriptions are on file, and may potentially do drug substitutions (generic vs brand, switch source country) if necessary. In the case of any order changes, these are done in consultation with the patient.

Doctor Approval

New prescriptions in the system are typically sent to Doctor Approval for a physician authorized in the distribution country to counter-sign the original prescription. For example, Canadian products require a Canadian doctor to counter-sign the prescription. UK products require a UK doctor to counter-sign the prescription.

Authorized physicians review the patient profile as well as the original prescription against the entire patient medical history to ensure medications are correctly prescribed and appropriate dosage recorded.

PharmacyWire also has support for medications by species so that it can also be used for pets. In this case, veterinarians review the medications using the same process.

Picking

At this stage, the physical paperwork is produced for the order including the invoice, prescription labels and Patient Education (PE) documents from First Data Bank (FDB).

Paperwork on all invoices can be branded specifically based on the source of the order. For example, affiliate websites connected directly to a PharmacyWire installation may have their own branding on printed materials. Pharmacies filling through third party vendors may want their branding placed on invoices. Branding options will depend entirely on how the installation of PharmacyWire is configured and how agreements are negotiated with the source of the order.

Picking can be done either individually by order, or by pick list batches. Pick lists are typically used in scenarios where batch numbers and expiry dates are tracked for each product. In this case, oldest batches are picked first with the pick list indicating the quantity of each batch to be picked.

Therapeutic Screening

Once the order has passed through Doctor Approval, the prescription and order are together presented to a licensed Pharmacist. The pharmacist first has the option to provide Patient Counselling if it has been requested and/or if this is the first fill of a prescription.

The medical profile of the patient is also presented to the pharmacist in this stage, including all allergies, other medications being taken, and other pertinent details including if the patient is a smoker, pregnant, nursing, etc. PharmacyWire executes interaction checks on all medications being ordered against their particular patient profile, and the order cannot be processed until these interactions have been reviewed and discussed with the patient.

Ship Medications

Once the order is successfully picked, it is prepared for shipping. Multiple shippers can be configured (such as CanadaPost, DHL, RoyalMail) with each shipper having their own shipping manifest. Manifests are prepared in batches, with different shipping parameters allowed per manifest (for example, some shippers require dimensions per parcel, others don’t). Once each batch is shipped, manifest response files are used to validate the orders in the batch automatically, moving them to the In Transit queue. Once an order has moved to the In Transit queue, it is “returned” to the retailer indicating it is shipped, with tracking numbers provided using our XMLCONNECT API.

Track Shipment Online

Automated electronic tracking of product shipments can be set up with integration to a variety of shipping solution provider.