If you’re located in Victoria, or you’ve kept pace with the release of the state government’s SafeScripts initiative that enables monitoring of high risk medicines, you may be aware that other states will soon be following suit.
South Australia is the second state ready to do so, and the rollout of their program, titled ScriptCheckSA, is scheduled to be implemented in late March 2021.
ScriptCheckSA is South Australia’s real time prescription monitoring computer system and provides prescribers and pharmacists with real-time information about a patient’s use of monitored and controlled drugs, which is an invaluable resource if they are considering prescribing or dispensing these drugs. Having access to this kind of information equips prescribers with better data and could ultimately lead to safer clinical decisions.
Prescription drug dependence, misuse and diversion are an increasing concern in Australia. A real time monitoring system such as ScriptCheckSA helps to alleviate misuse, while still ensuring that patients who genuinely require access to these medications can still obtain them.
How will ScriptCheckSA impact prescribers?
ScriptCheckSA is not intended to prevent doctors or pharmacists from prescribing or dispensing monitored or controlled drugs – whether it is appropriate to prescribe a particular medication remains the clinical decision of the treating prescriber or pharmacist.
For our South Australian practices, the implementation of ScriptCheckSA will allow you to safely prescribe and dispense high-risk medication, and transmit that information in real time to a centralised database, which can then be accessed by other doctors and pharmacists in subsequent consultations. This provides access to valuable information for prescribers and dispensers to facilitate the early identification, treatment and support for patients who may be starting to show signs of drug dependence.
What can you do to prepare now?
In preparation for ScriptCheckSA, a legislative change was made to the Controlled Substances (Poisons) Regulations 2011, including mandatory Drugs of Dependency reporting to the Department of Health SA from 1st November 2020. You can read more about this here.
If your Patient Management System has integration with a Prescription Exchange service and you have this enabled the reporting will be done automatically.
For Bp VIP.net practices:
- Ensure that you are using the latest release of Bp VIP.net
- Ensure the eRx prescription exchange service is activated. For more information on this please refer to the Knowledge Base article ‘Set Up eRx’, available via Help > Online from within Bp VIP.net
Where can you find more information?
A list of frequently asked questions is available on the SAHealth website. If you have a specific enquiry pertaining to the rollout and implementation of ScriptCheckSA, get in contact via email.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Louis Valenti is a marketing specialist at Best Practice Software. Find out more about Bp VIP.net – a practice management system designed for medical specialists.
