MedSync
- Anthony Campana
This feature of BestRx is included in the Standard/Premium tiers.
Med-Sync is a new feature included with version 5.8.0904 and forward that allows your pharmacy to easily automate the process of syncing up your patients' prescription refills. Prescriptions can be synced directly from the patient's profile and BestRx can also prompt you to sync a new prescription when it is entered into the system. The Med Sync feature will automatically calculate short fills, link up multiple prescriptions for the same therapy, and recognize when a new prescription is required to continue a certain med sync regimen.
Med-Sync, as a feature that combines prescriptions and creates a synchronization regiment, stars with the patient's profile as mentioned above and can additionally prompt the user when entering new prescriptions into the system.
Setup
There are some settings in BestRx that can be modified to the user's liking, and they are located under File > Pharmacy Setup > Med-Sync
Auto-prompt for Med-Sync: Indicate how you'd like the software to prompt for Med-Sync. The choices are All Medications, Maintenance Medications Only, or do not auto prompt.
Refill Queue for Med-Sync RXs: Select the default queue to utilize for Med-Sync. You can add a new queue by simply clicking the "Add New Queue" button. This is particularly helpful when the pharmacy does not want the MedSync queue to automatically pull traits from the Refill Queue settings and want the queue to behave differently. Please refer to the Manage Rx Custom Queues article.
Indicate Ready for Refill: Indicate how early prescriptions should be ready for refill. The default is set to 3 days, a small change from our regular 5 day interval. This is in effort to avoid patients from ending up with prescription refills being overlapped and the patients ending up with more pills than needed.
Remove Patient from Med-Sync: Indicate how many months to wait for no activity before removing the patient from Med-Sync. This will help prune the feature a bit and automatically remove patients that are not frequently visiting the pharmacy.
Synchronizing Prescriptions
When all queue options have been set to desired settings, simply open the patient's profile as shown below to begin synchronizing prescriptions.
In the above example we will attempt to synchronize two prescriptions that are ready for a refill with a prescription that currently has refills, but is not yet ready. After selecting the prescriptions, the user needs to select the Sync processing mode, and click Process Rxs or hit Enter when the button is highlighted. **Please keep in mind that the software and therefore MedSync respects the "Indicate Ready for Refill" setting from MedSync in the Pharmacy Setup menu, and options will default to that interval. The default is 3.** The software will then display the following screen.
This is the main MedSync form window, where we can select the synchronization regiment and its details. For this example we've modified these test prescriptions for shorter and uncommon directions and day supplies. In addition, the software automatically chooses some of the information for us, and has the option to Short Fill Eligible Rxs on Yes by default.
Yellow Fill Info means the prescription will be Short Filled as needed. Please keep in mind that some medications have locked in intervals, and therefore cannot be short filled; these medications will always take priority during calculations as the software attempts to find the appropriate synchronization combination.
Orange Fill Info means the prescription is in pre-sync status, and the software is filling the script normally, however it's not yet considered synchronized with other scripts. This can be common for prescriptions with shorter day supplies that will be filled numerous times before other prescriptions are refilled.
Green Fill Info status means the prescription will be considered properly synchronized on the date of fill.
Gray Fill Info status with Red text means the prescription has no refills left, and a new prescription will be required to continue this synchronization with the prescription.
Bright Yellow RX/Drug fields mean the fill will require a new prescription as also mentioned in the field above.
Pink Qty Remaining indicates the quantity is low, and the software will display more info in other fields, such as the above mentioned prescription required/fill info.
Given the information and the examples, we can deduct some of the following details about these prescriptions:
The prescription with the longest day supply, Xanax (RX# 100006), by default controls the synchronization date and day sync interval based on day supply. This causes the software to automatically calculate rest of the details accordingly. Based on its first fill date of 09/05/2018, then adding 20 day supply while subtracting 3 days for our refill indicator, leaves the prescription to be available to first normally sync on 09/22/2018. As the prescription is currently the Anchor (more on that below), the one and only fill will show up as a sync fill.
The software then takes a look at all the other quantities and day supplies, and attempts to figure out what the proper interval should be. In our case, we have the lowest day supply prescription for Ambien (RX# 100002) at a 5 day supply. This minus the 3 indicator days, causes the software to pre-sync fill the prescription at a 2 day interval as shown by the dates above. Every one of the prescriptions, due to its short day supply, is a pre-sync fill as mentioned previously. The prescription will however need a new script written as it will have no remaining refills on the 5th step of the pre-sync process.
The Valium (RX# 100001) prescription is the last on our list, and it was filled on 9/4/2018; with our other prescriptions more or less dictating the interval and this particular medication's ability to be short filled, the software will attempt to lock into the 09/22/2018 sync date and figure out what to do with the prescription accordingly. Counting back from the sync date, the software figures out a regular pre-sync fill of a 10 day supply as dictated by the prescription. The software then takes 09/15/2018, the date of that fill, and subtracts 3 days per refill indicator setting, landing us on 09/12/2018. The software then figures that there's only a 6 day supply left, and creates the appropriate short fill.
With this, the synchronization calculation is done, and we may choose to Sync Prescriptions if everything looks correct.
The user can in addition deselect any of these prescriptions, or Remove All from Med-Sync.
Regarding the Anchor mentioned beforehand, and the "A" it's attached to; the anchor function allows the user to re-anchor the synchronization to another prescription. By doing this, the system can re-calculate the interval and date by using the selected prescription's settings instead.
If however the prescription cannot be adjusted to a different sync interval, the software will display a warning regarding doing so as such
The user has an option to simply deselect the prescription that cannot be synced, or cancel the interval change. In this case if we were to accept the interval change, the software would then display the following
As you can see, the prescription with the chosen anchor will display a white A on a blue background, and the synchronization will be re-calculated. The software has made some modifications in order to enhance and lessen the burden and avoid as many pick ups by patient as possible; Ambien as the prescription with a day supply that did not fit was removed, and would need to be set up on a separate regiment.
If there's a prescription in the MedSync regimen that will require a new script, the software will display the typical messages when attempting to process, such as New RX with info or a prompt for a Refill Request. When the prescription is filled, whether on the spot or after obtaining said refill, not only will the software as if we want to include this prescription in the regimen, but will also ask you to link the prescription as shown below:
If there are any issues with the script, the software will also display the following:
Simply choose the appropriate option, and proceed as normal. In our example we added the script to the regimen and billed it to insurance right after. The regimen will adjust and move forward depending on the settings selected. Remember, you can simply click on any of the calendar icons
throughout the software (when MedSync is available and applicable) to review these regimens.
Reviewing Synchronization Settings and Schedule
When all prescriptions have been synchronized for the patient, some areas of the software will go under small changes to reflect these settings
The main processing screen and the profile screen will display a sync icon when accessed. The icon shows up on the profile whenever any prescriptions are synchronized, and the icon on the main processing screen will display when working with a sync patient. The icon can be clicked to open up the sync page and review/change the regimen
The main processing screen will also display the next sync date on the bottom left of any prescription that's being synchronized; clicking the "..." button will open up the sync regimen page same as the icon.
The patient's file will display some information about synchronization as well; just like the main screen, the "..." button will open the same regimen page
Calendar Functionality
The new calendar function will also allow for reviewing of synchronization regimens but more importantly show all scheduled tasks in one convenient place. You can access the calendar from the main screen with the calendar button on the bottom left.
The calendar page will display all tasks as mentioned above; for the purposes of this article, we only see the MedSync occurrences. Reviewing these is as simple as clicking on any particular day, which will bring up the following page
This report's biggest draw is the ability to search by a sync date range, and view many prescriptions at a time in a list. The report can further be narrowed down to be generated by either Patient, or RX number to narrow the results down to a specific record. More features may be added into it in the future.
The function will perform the same for other patients with respect to all limitations; simply repeat the steps to synchronize medications for another patient. You can also review all synchronizations at large from the Calendar function.