This tutorial will show you everything you need to know about setting your pharmacy up to process auto-refills for your patients.
When a prescription is set up for auto-refills, it will be added to the Refill Queue without any user intervention required. From the Refill Queue the pharmacy can then process the refills with a streamlined workflow.
Using auto-refills is fairly straightforward, but there are a few options you can set so that you can customize the process for your pharmacy's needs. Click on one of the topics on the left to learn more about the different options and how to process auto-refills.
Pharmacy Setup
The first option you need to set is whether or not you want new patients to be activated for auto-refills by default. This option can be found in the Pharmacy Setup screen. The value of this option will determine whether or not new patients in your system are activated for auto-refills.
If you would like to activate/deactivate all of your existing patients for auto-refills, click on the "Update All" button next to the field. If the field is set to "No" then this will deactivate all patients and prescriptions for auto-refills. If this field is set to "Yes" then this will activate all patients and prescriptions for auto-refills and set the proper auto-refill dates by looking at the fill date and days supply for each prescription.
The second option you need to set is how long before the refill is actually due that you want the prescriptions to be automatically added to the Refill Queue. You can set different values for controlled and non-controlled substances if you would like. These options can also be found in the Pharmacy Setup screen.
Patient Setup
From the Patient (F3) screen you can indicate whether an certain patient should be activated for auto-refills. This value defaults to the value you set in the Pharmacy Setup screen. The value that is set for a patient will determine whether or not a patient's prescriptions are activated for auto-refills by default.
There are 2 basic models a pharmacy can follow for auto-refills, opt-in and opt-out. With an opt-in model, a pharmacy only activates a patient for auto-refills if the patient specifically requests it. With an opt-out model, a pharmacy activates all their patients for auto-refills by default and only deactivates a patient if they specifically request it.
By providing the Auto Refill option on the Patient screen, it makes it easy to manage the preferences of your patients regardless of what model your pharmacy chooses when processing auto-refills.
RX Options
On the RxProcessing screen, you will see the Auto Refill field towards the bottom-left corner. The value that this field will default to when filling a prescriptions depends on the settings in the Pharmacy Setup and Patient File screens.
If you have Auto Refills set to "No" for the patient, then the prescription will not be set to auto-refill. If you have the option set to "Yes" for the patient, the prescription will be set to auto-refill and the auto-refill date will default according to the settings in the Pharmacy Setup screen.
The prescription will only be set to auto-refill if there is a valid date in the Auto Refill field on the RxProcessing screen. If there is no date in the field, the prescription will not auto-refill, regardless of whether or not the box is checked.
Process Refills
Processing the auto-refills is done from the Refill Queue, which can be found by clicking on Billing -> A. Refill Queue towards the top of the screen.
Each day, when you first visit this screen, the BestRx program will scan through your prescriptions and add any valid prescriptions to the Refill Queue. Don't worry if you forget to process from the Refill Queue on a certain day, those auto-refills will not be forgotten. The BestRx program remembers when you last processed from the Refill Queue, so even if you skip a few days, the program will go back and scan for all the days that you missed.
The patients with refills waiting to be processed will be displayed on the left and the prescriptions for the selected patient will be displayed on the right. From here you can choose to either process some, all or none of a patient's prescriptions.
If you choose to process prescriptions, the program will take you to the RxProcessing screen so you can process the refills like you normally would. Once all of the patient's prescriptions have been processed, the program will automatically bring you back to the Refill Queue screen so that you can process the next patient.