Prescribing

I went to Campbeltown to do some training work on consulting with computers and Vision 3. Thanks to all the team there, but this drew to my attention to how many practices never quite get around to setting up Vision 3 therapy correctly and this just makes your life difficult!

The steps to succesfully using Vision 3 therapy functions are to:

• Setup a Drug Formulary
• Set users to select from formulary
• Spend the time setting sensible and agreed Drug Defaults
• Understand what Dosage Codes do and how to ignore them

The first is essential as it limits your initial choice of drug. Remember: a drug formulary is practice wide, not per user, and you can only have one formulary for each practice. In V4 land we are going to extend this functionality for multiple formularies per practice but, as you can imagine, this may get rather more complicated!

You can setup a drug formulary by hand, by trawling the action groups and double clicking to select or de-select drugs or you can use the Drug Dictionary Utilities to quickly create a rough and ready formulary which you can fine tune later.

Enable this per user in Control Panel, Security, Edit User, 'Select Drugs from Drug Formulary' and 'By Drug Name'.

Then you are no longer selecting from all the drugs in the dictionary but from a subset, thus 5 paracetamol preparations rather than 100!