What is a Monitored Dosage System(MDS)?

A monitored dosage system allows our users to blister medication for patients and have functionality to print custom paperwork. It also allows you to phase dispenses without sending a phase fee request to the PCRS which is useful for community patients who collect blisters but are not registered for phasing.

Why use MDS?

There are multiple different scenarios that would require you to use a dosage system. Some of them are listed below. In a nutshell, MDS allows the pharmacist more flexibity when it comes to cycle start dates compared to a nursing home, as nursing homes usually all start on the same date. (This will be explained in further detail below):

Community patients: These are patients who are not part of a home so they have staggered cycle start dates. MDS will allow you to specify the cycle start date every time you dispense a new cycle to a patient. Where as a Nursing homes cycle start date is fixed. Nursing Homes with staggered cycle dates or ever changing start dates. Low volume of patients within the home. This can be decided by the pharmacy also once they see how an MDS cycle and a nursing home cycle are completed.

Physicatirc Homes: Nearly always MDS as they have a likely hood to enter back into the general population and become regular non blistered patients again.

What is a Nursing Home?

TouchStore Rx defines a Nursing Home Cycle as follows: A Nursing Home Cycle encapsulates all the practice administration required to be completed prior to the delivery of all patient medications to the selected Nursing Home for the next week / month.

Practice administration for a nursing home Is:

• Pre-ordering of required items.
• Creation of repeat dispenses.
• Perform dispense edits.
• Printing blister pack labels or cassette sheets.
• Printing MAR sheets
• Completing dispense sessions.

The practice administration for each patient, as outlined above, is connected or linked through a common start date. All patients in a nursing home will receive their next set, or cycle, of medications on the same start date. By creating a single start date for the nursing home at the beginning of each cycle, TouchStore Rx users can process all patients assigned to that nursing home at the same time, thus making the process extremely efficient.

When you dispense an item for a nursing home patient, whether Ad Hoc or MDS the ‘Complete’ button remains on the PMR in place of the ‘Repeat & Cpt’ button. You are only allowed to enter one script per patient per cycle and if you click Insert again the currently open session will appear. You have to complete a nursing home directly from the ‘MDS’ module

It is common for nursing homes to have an account and have the scripts charged to that. Please note that for nursing home patients their Date of Birth (DOB) must entered against their file. There should be a check for this when you click the ‘OK’ button on the ‘Patient Maintenance’ screen.