prescriptions Archives

Introducing the Prescription Formulary

Posted on October 9, 2019October 9, 2019

Over the past few months we have been working hard on an exciting update to the Prescriptions extension. Today we are happy to share with you the Prescription Formulary: a faster and more reliable way to write your most common prescriptions.

What Is A Formulary?

A formulary is a list of medication prescription protocols that may contain information on approved dosage, route, frequency, duration and more. Formularies are a helpful tool to guide a user to prescribe a recommended and safe prescription. You might be familiarly with this formulary: https://www.amazon.com/Exotic-Animal-Formulary-James-Carpenter/dp/0323444504.

How Does the Prescription Formulary Work in WRMD?

If you are using the Prescription extension, then you are familiar with filling out each field of the prescription form to write your prescriptions. Now with the Prescription Formulary, you can define the values for a prescription that should be auto-populated when choosing a particular medication from your formulary. This will not only make it faster to write a prescription, it will also help you and you coworkers to follow consistent medication protocols.

In settings, when your Prescription extension is activated, the Prescription Formulary link will be in the Extensions box on the left column. After you click on Prescription Formulary you can click the green plus icon to add a new formula.

Next; fill out the displayed form for the formula you want to create. Remember that a formula is used to create a prescription so your formula should be named something that represents what its prescriptions would be used for. For example, if you give all cat caught song birds clavamox, you might name it Cat caught clavamox for songbirds. You can then fill out all the default values of the formula that you want autofilled in a prescription. You can also specify that you want the prescription’s dose to be automatically calculated based on the patients most recent weight. If you want the prescription to start on the same day it’s written, then check the indicating checkbox and provide the number of days the prescription should run for.

Formula for Cat caught clavamox for songbirds — Formula for *Cat caught clavamox for songbirds*

After you have created your formulas you will see them listed on the settings screen. You can always edit them later if they need to be updated.

Now For the Exciting Part!

Now on a patients prescriptions page when you type in the Drug / Medication field, WRMD will search your formulas matching the text. You can then click the formula name to fill out the prescription!

Using the formula for cat caught clavamox for songbirds

Of course, you’re not required to use a formula to write a prescription. Additionally you can modify the values of the prescription after the formula has populated the fields.

What About Veterinarians?

In addition to the Prescription Formulary we are integrating veterinarians into prescriptions. In case you did not know, WRMD allows you to keep a list of the veterinarians you work with. As a Super Admin in the settings area, click the veterinarians link under the Account heading on the left sidebar. When adding or updating an existing veterinarian you can now indicate which user the veterinarian is.

Now when writing a prescription you will see a list of your veterinarian(s). If a veterinarian is logged in and is writing a prescription, their name will be automatically selected from the dropdown list.

What Do You Think?

We love your feedback so please tell us what you think! Don’t forget to click the Ask For Help link on the top right of WRMD to reach out to us. WE ARE HERE FOR YOU.

WRMD 3.0, Over the Launch Hump…

Posted on January 11, 2016

We would like to thank everybody for being patient while we launched WRMD 3.0. The first week was full of communication and it was great for us to get to know our users a little more. Our favorite part was when some of our users such as Marita at High Desert in Bend, Oregon and Lucinda at Bird Ally X in Humboldt, CA started to answer other users questions! Thank you, it saved me so much time. As you can see we now have more of a forum space within the message area. You can choose a message to be private or open to forum. When you have a question, if you phrase the title well, others that have similar questions can look at the message string and get answers and talk to one another. We don’t expect this to turn into Facebook, but it is a way for rehabbers all over the world to easily talk to one another. We also want to thank all of the very active users for their help and communications, we think you know who you are – Paula, Dorothy, Cristin, Marita, Lucinda and many others. Thank you for all of your updates!!!

There Were Several Little Issue Here and There that We Have Updated

The sign-in issue: when we transferred to the new database everybody had to reset their passwords. Unfortunately we also had a bug with resetting passwords. So, if you created a new password you were able to get into your account, but once you signed out you could not sign back in because your new password did not actually get update. Sorry about that!
At first when you signed-in you were in 2016, when you went to look at 2015, you could not get back into 2016 without signing off and signing back on. This is now fixed as well.
There was an issue with time as well. Everything was in UTC 0, which was London time for the first few days. So, anything that was recorded during those days will have the wrong time, but everything is fixed now.
There was a minor issue with how the treatment records were organized oldest to newest and even if you changed it in settings, it was reverting, but that got fixed.
The lab was not taking info at first, that got fixed.
I could go on for awhile here. Suffice to say that we have been working hard, and are grateful for your patience while we work out the kinks.
The “People” section is updated so that you can better manage your rescuers, volunteers and donors.

Years in Account Hopefully you have been able to figure out how to navigate through the years. On the bottom left of the screen there is an option for the year you wish to look at. If you want to do searches that include 2015 and 2016 you need to go to “Search Records”, put in your dates and search that way. If you just want to look at pending cases only, you can do the “Quick Search”|”Disposition Pending” and that will give you results for all years. If you enter terms into quick search it will only search the year you are in.

We hope that everybody is getting used to the new Locations feature. One thing to remember is that, anything from previous years might not be completely accurate. Everything got transferred over, but it might not be in the correct format. There is not much we can do about this, unfortunately. Also, when you change the disposition to any but Pending the location will blank. So, if you have animals in freezers or out for testing you should record it in the location field as well as rechecks or keywords. The location, however, will remain in the history.

Due to the nature of managing this database we have had to reduce the number of custom fields that can be created per account to 10. If you have more then 10 custom fields you will not be able to enter new info into any fields created after the first 10 that were created. If you require more than 10 custom fields, please contact us about potentially creating a custom extension for your organization. Because of the time and resources involved with custom extensions we will charge a fee, on a sliding scale, depending on how extensive the customization is.

We Are Still Working on a Few Things

The search function inside the treatment record
Fixing the autocomplete bug
Fixing the “No Significant Findings” entry that auto-populates to the initial care comments field
Prescriptions given during the first day of care will auto-populate to the initial care screen
Increased privacy and security so that information is less accessible to your users
Necropsy and Husbandry extensions
Help Section

Thank you again for your patience. I know it has not been completely perfect, but we are so grateful to work with such a wonderful group of compassionate people. Thank you for being so kind to us in your feedback!

Extension of the Month: Prescriptions

Posted on April 15, 2014

The Prescriptions extension is the very first extension we created and one of the most valuable, long term. Every veterinarian and every rehabilitator has their own prescriptions they give to wildlife and it is hard to know what is right and what is not. If our community can correctly record medications and the overall effectiveness of these prescriptions, we may finally have solid evidence of what seems to work and what obviously does not work. Please consider using this extension.

If you need to learn how to activate prescriptions please visit http://help.wrmd.org/video/extending-wildlife-rehabilitation-md/

About the Prescriptions Extension

Prescriptions is a very important extension. Ideally this one should be activated at all times. Any animal on medications should have their prescriptions recorded in this extension. This is great information to be collected so that later you can do simple research to see how well medications worked or didn’t work. You may get in a unique case and use certain drugs that work successfully. Years later, you may see a similar case and want to know what worked last time. It also can help you keep track of the entire medication history of the animal.

Screen Shot 2014-03-31 at 5.53.03 PM

How to use the Prescriptions Extension

When the Prescription extension is activated it will show up as one of the main tabs on top of the screen. This extension records the dose, the actual prescription, start date, end date and if the medication is a controlled substance. Frequency, dosage and route should be recorded within the Prescription field.

To fill in a prescription first click on the arrow icon. A box will pop up with a form to fill in your prescription. Once completed click submit. If you need to edit or delete the entry, click on the circle arrow icon to edit it or the trash can icon to delete it.

Preferably write your prescriptions similar to this format “Meloxicam 1.5mg/ml PO BID (0.5mg/kg)” If you do, then the prescription has a better chance of being printed properly. Prescriptions can be printed by clicking the checkbox to the left of the prescription and then clicking the printer icon above the checkboxes.

There are two prescription reports available on the Reports page. One reports the Prescriptions due today and the other is a Controlled substance log of all prescriptions that use a controlled substance.

The Autocomplete extension can be a very useful extension to the Prescription field if you use the same prescriptions many times.