> -----Original Message----- > From: Cedric Meyerowitz [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Monday, 26 February 2007 8:30 AM
> You wrote: "We we told that this was the case in the retail > pharmacy software market, and that the pharmacists were > benefiting from this". > > Now this is utter bullsh*t. It was advice given to the RACGP National Computer Committee nearly twenty years ago. I wonder whether anything may have changed in twenty years? > Most (if not all) pharmacy > software does not indicate to pharmacist which medicines are > RB. That is why a lot of pharmacists send patients back to > GP telling patient to tell GP they can get for example > Lactulose on PBS. > I am surprised to hear that most (if not all) pharmacy software does not indicate to pharmacist which medicines are RB. I will ask the pharmacists near our surgery. However, if a pharmacist wants to know the PBS restrictions on any medication, he or she can look it up in the online Yellow Book, like the rest of us, can't he or she? I had believed that the reason why pharmacists send patients back to us to get PBS prescriptions for restricted or authority items is that there is a lot (and I mean a *lot*) of fraudulent prescribing of restricted PBS items for patients whose conditions don't actually qualify them for such prescriptions. I believe that this had led pharmacists to feel that if advise a patient to buy lactulose over the counter, we must have made a mistake = surely the patient deserves to get it on a PBS prescription like all the others. I am amazed that there has not been more investigation by the PBS of what I believe to be a huge amount of fraud on the PBS. Do you remember the outcry a year or so ago when the PBS started asking prescribers of terbinafine on the PBS for the details of the pathology tests that the doctors said when applying for the authority that they had had done but for which there was no item claimed by any pathology lab? I reckon a review of PBS prescriptions for lactulose (for a start) would yield some interesting findings about the number of Australians who apparently have malignant neoplasia or hepatic coma and who have survived their condition for a surprisingly long time. > Secondly my pharmacist next door to me, complained bitterly > about his software support. He then upgraded to the new > version of software only to find that after conversion, all > old scripts are in a mess & impossible to do a search. He is > still complaing. This sounds a fair complaint, assuming that the fault is in the new version of the software and not because of something crazy that he has done. However, users of all clinical software complain about the functionality and support of their software, no matter how good the software or the support. The fact that your local pharmacist has some complaints is not by itself evidence that pharmacists haven't benefited from a smaller number of software vendors in their market, nor can we infer the opposite, that is, that having more vendors of pharmacy software in the market will improve the functionality or level of support. Oliver Frank, general practitioner 255 North East Road, Hampstead Gardens South Australia 5086 Ph. 08 8261 1355 Fax 08 8266 5149 M 0407 181 683 _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
