What is the 'Short Course Monthly' option on a Dosage System?

When a patient requires medication for a short period of time, like an antibiotic for 7 days or an item is taken on alternate days, the ‘ short course’ function allows the user to capture this more unusual ‘complex dosage’.

The default for Short Course is 7 days. If you tick the 'Short Course Monthly' option when setting up a Dosage System, this will be changed to a full 28 days, this may be desired if the Dosage System is one cycle over one month.

Where can I find the ‘Complex Dosage Configuration’ screen.

When dispensing to an MDS patient, after clicking 'New Script' and entering in your first drug to dispense, you will see a 'short Course' button. Highlighted in the below screenshot.

This opens the ‘Complex Dosage Configuration’ screen.

A seven day short course 'grid' is displayed by default. This is so that you can for example, dispense the drugs on alternating or ‘irregular’ days during a given week, unlike your typical week in which drugs are dispensed via rounds daily.

If you wish to have the short course rounds appear on the paperwork then you must have the same round times as the dosage system. There has not been a demand for different short course round times to appear on paperwork. A short course is just for alternative days, such as once a week, etc. Customers who use HDMEDI/TOSHO robots can use whatever short course round times they wish.

On the Complex Dosage Configuration screen, you can specify the exact dates and times an item is taken. The dispense quantity is not automatically populated when entering a short course.

When entering a complex dosage system you must tick the ‘Irregular’ option. This will allow you to manually enter the Dispense Qty.

Clicking on ‘Copy Pattern’ will copy the tablets you have entered for a particular day, into the other fields for the same day. For example, if you entered 0.5 tablets under the first Wednesday of the month and you then select ‘Copy Pattern’. This will place the same round amounts across all the other Wednesdays in the month.

Clicking on ‘Copy Alternate’ puts the first round amount entered on every other day in the month. So if you enter ‘2’ tablets for Tuesday and 2 for Wednesday, ‘Copy Alternate’ will place 2 tablets for every second day after that.