Drug Recipe Management: Quick Guide

Drug Recipes in MediRecords allow clinicians to save and re-use frequently prescribed drug combinations, which is especially valuable for medications not listed by the PBS or TGA, or for compounded medicines.

You can create Private Recipes (available only to you) or Practice Recipes (shared across your clinic), and once created a recipe can be edited, deleted, cloned, or have its sharing permissions changed, just like a standard medication.

Contents:

1. Drug Recipe Overview
2. Creating a Drug Recipe
3. Editing a Drug Recipe
4. Deleting a Drug Recipe
5. Deactivating & Reactivating a Drug Recipe
6. Cloning a Drug Recipe
7. Ensuring a Drug Recipe Is Scanned by Real-Time Prescription Monitoring
8. Troubleshooting

Drug Recipe Overview

To access your protocols and recipes, open the Resources page (click More -> Resources) and click Drugs.

Recipes

There are three types of recipes - Private, Practice and Community.

Private recipes are created by clinicians for private use only, and will only be available to the user that created them. Practice recipes, which have been created by local users at the clinic, are shared with, and available to all users at their practice. Community recipes are created by MediRecords users that actively contribute to, and share clinical information with the MediRecords community. Recipes shared with the community are available to all clinicians and practices using MediRecords. 

By default, the Recipes page displays a summary of all recipes that are available for you to use. The summary includes recipes that are private, shared with your practice or the MediRecords community. From the summary page, you can quickly view the recipe Name, Form, Quantity, Restriction, Repeats, Share level, Rating and Status, and who the protocol was Created By.

Creating a Drug Recipe

1. Click More to reveal a drop-down list and Select Resources

2. Click Drug recipes

3. Click Recipes

4. Click New Recipe

5. You will be brought to the New Recipe form. Complete all required fields.

Notes:

1. If your Drug Recipe contains a Schedule 8 medication/ingredient, you must select Yes for Schedule 8 Medication. This will ensure that prescriptions written for this Drug Recipe will pass through the correct Schedule 8 prescribing workflow in line with national and state legislation. 

2. If your Drug Recipe contains a Schedule 8 medication/ingredient, you must include the generic name for the ingredient in the Drug Recipe Name field. This field is scanned by the Real-Time Prescription Monitoring Service during prescribing. 

3. The Form field is a search and select field to assist with finding a specific Form in a big list.

7. To add the ingredients, type the first few letters in the Ingredients box. It will list all matching ingredients. You can also free type into this field. 
Fill the dosage and unit and then click Add.

8. To add more ingredients, follow the same process - lookup/ freetype the Ingredient, enter the Strength and Unit, and click Add.

9. To set Sharing level of Drug Recipe you are trying to create Click box under Share to reveal options

10. To set Restriction of new Drug recipe Click the box under Restriction to reveal options.

11. Your new recipe is now available for use.

Editing a Drug Recipe

Click More to reveal a drop-down list and Select Resources

Click Drugs

Click Recipes

Click the Tick-box next to the name and Click Edit Recipe to open the recipe form

Update the recipe with all the required details

Click Save to apply the changes

Click Yes to acknowledge the recipe has been updated

The recipe has now been updated

Deleting a Drug Recipe

Similar to Edit, you can only delete recipes you have created. Check the box next to one of your recipes and click Delete.

*NOTE: Deleting a recipe is a permanent action and cannot be reversed.

You will be greeted with a warning prompt. Click Yes to proceed.
The drug recipe has now been deleted.

Deactivating & Reactivating a Drug Recipe

You can manage the active status of drug recipes. To deactivate a recipe, check the box next to it. Click on Update Status and select Deactivate.

The recipe has now been deactivated. To reactivate a recipe, change the Filter to show only Inactive recipes, as shown.
Check the box next to the inactive recipe, click Update Status, and select Activate

The recipe is now active again.

Cloning a Drug Recipe

To clone a recipe, check the box next to one. Click More and select Clone.

Ensuring a Drug Recipe Is Scanned by Real-Time Prescription Monitoring

Drug Recipes for medicines related to addiction, such as cannabis products containing high levels of THC, can trigger a Real-Time Prescription Monitoring (RTPM) check even though they fall outside the standard monitored drug list. This depends on how the Generic Name is used when the Recipe is created.

To ensure a Drug Recipe is correctly scanned:

1. In the ingredient list, select the correct generic drug name from the provided options. Spelling must match exactly, as it must be selected from the list rather than typed freely.
2. Include the same Generic Name in the Drug Recipe Name.

The ingredients still need to be populated so they print correctly on the prescription, but the RTPM check is triggered based on the Drug Recipe Name. RTPM scanning is performed on the final page of the prescribing workflow, in the same way as for standard monitored drugs.

Further Reading

• Real-Time Prescription Monitoring (RTPM): Configuration & Quick Guide
• Prescribing Schedule 8 (S8) Monitored Medications

Troubleshooting

Changing a Drug Recipe's restriction to RPBS during prescribing causes unexpected script behaviour

Cause: If a Drug Recipe was created as non-PBS, and the restriction is then changed to RPBS at the point of prescribing, the following issues have been observed: re-opening a saved draft script does not trigger the pop-up to enter a DVA number, the script's type changes to Private on saving, and the authority form number disappears.

Resolution: Keep the restriction consistent with how the Drug Recipe was originally configured. If a medication needs to be available under both PBS and RPBS, set this up as separate Drug Recipes rather than changing the restriction manually during prescribing.

Escalate when: the issue persists after keeping the restriction consistent with the recipe's original configuration.

Unable to edit a Drug Recipe created by another user

Cause: Only the creator of a Drug Recipe can edit it, including Practice-shared recipes.

Resolution: Clone the recipe and edit your own copy instead, see Cloning a Drug Recipe above. If the recipe is a Practice-shared recipe, once your updated copy is in use you may want to deactivate the older version if it's no longer needed, see Deactivating & Reactivating a Drug Recipe above.

Escalate when: the recipe still cannot be edited after cloning it.