ePharmacy - CMS

Chronic Medication Service (CMS)

(Continuity of pharmaceutical care of patients with long term medical conditions)

The Chronic Medication Service (CMS) allows patients with long-term conditions to register with the community pharmacy of their choice for the provision of pharmaceutical care as part of a shared agreement between the patient, CP and GP.

A patient will register for the service at a Pharmacy of their choice subject to eligibility criteria (similar to MAS but for all patient groups). The Pharmacy will then provide a package of care relative to CMS that may consist of the delivery of pharmaceutical services, which may or may not include dispensing activity.

The Prescribing GP practice will be able to issue a ‘Master’ prescription that will allow the Pharmacy to dispense items over a period of time. The GP system will print the GP10/s (master prescription/s) and will send an electronic prescribing message(s) to the central ePharmacy message store and also print a unique reference number (UPN) on the prescription in the form of a Bar30-Jan-2008to the pharmacy they are registered with for dispensing. The pharmacy scans the bar code, which pulls down the associated electronic message that the pharmacist uses for dispensing purposes. The Pharmacy sends an electronic message for each dispensing episode via the ePharmacy message store to Practitioner Services for payment processing (reimbursement). The pharmacy retains the prescription until the identified CMS dispensing is completed and thereafter sends the ‘master’ prescription to Practitioner Services.

eCMS will support the CMS by providing electronic support at key points in the CMS process. It will do this by utilising the ePharmacy infrastructure to allow electronic data (messages) to be made available between the participating systems to provide timely clinical, statistical and payment information.

The GP practice will benefit as they will receive regular feedback from pharmacies in respect of activity for their CMS registered patients, and from a reduction in the number of prescriptions issued.

The patient will benefit from CMS as a result of the CMS care package at Pharmacy and potential for reduced visits to GP practice.

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