Before you prescribe or administer medications to outpatients

You can add information to the EPMA banner about your patient. For example, the patient's allergies, height, and weight.

Your organisation decides what details you must provide before you can prescribe and administer medication.

If you prescribe a medication, then add an allergy to that medication, you can still administer the medication. You view allergy information when administering. This is different to EPMA for inpatients, where the medication must be reviewed before you can administer the medication.

Before you prescribe and administer medications to outpatients on a mobile

You can’t prescribe medications to outpatients on a mobile.

Before you prescribe and administer medications to outpatients on a desktop

You can view the EPMA banner from  Outpatients > Clinic List > double-click on a patient's name > Patient Detail > Meds.

The EPMA banner contains information about the patient. Your organisation decides what to show, but in outpatients the EPMA banner usually includes allergy details, and height and weight. In our standard product, the information in the EPMA banner is not mandatory, but it depends on your organisation.

Above the EPMA banner is the patient banner. The patient banner for outpatients is light blue. The patient banner for inpatients is dark blue.

Your organisation can configure the EPMA banner for outpatients separately from the EPMA banner for inpatients. The EPMA banners might contain different information.

Read more about EPMA banner for inpatients

For safe prescribing and administration, you must complete mandatory fields before you can prescribe. Your organisation decides which fields are mandatory.

  1. Select any field from the EPMA banner.

  2. Mandatory fields are marked .

In the exceptional circumstance that you can't complete mandatory fields before prescribing, for example, during an anaphylactic reaction, you can temporarily override this requirement. This temporary override allows you to prescribe multiple medications. All information is auditable.

  1. Select Override and enter a reason.

  2. When you leave Meds, the banner reinstates the mandatory fields.

  1. From  Outpatients > Clinic List > double-click on a patient's name > Patient Detail > Meds, select Allergies.

  2. Select Search / Add, and enter the allergy in the search box.

    You can enter up to 40 characters. You can search using the first three letters of your search term.

    The allergy field is a SNOMED CT Systematised Nomenclature of Medicine (Clinical Terms). Provides the clinical language that facilitates electronic communication between healthcare professionals in clear and unambiguous terms, and can be used to code, retrieve and analyse clinical data. clinical note. The search returns all allergies in the SNOMED CT database that match.

    Read more about the SNOMED CT clinical note

    If you can't find an allergy, speak to your pharmacist.

    Read more about entering allergies that don't appear in SNOMED CT

  3. Select the patient's allergy.

  4. Optional: select Append comment to add supporting comments.

  5. Optional: complete any additional fields.

    Additional fields might include the type and severity of the allergy.

  6. Select Save.

    The allergy and supporting comments are shown in the EPMA banner.

    Selecting allergies removes ‘no known allergy’.

If you can’t find an allergy, speak to your pharmacist.

  1. From  Outpatients > Clinic List > double-click on a patient's name > Patient Detail > Meds, select Allergies.

  2. Select Search / Add, and enter the allergy in the search box.

    You can enter up to 40 characters.

    If you can't find the allergy in the SNOMED CT database, enter ‘Drug allergy’, ‘Drug intolerance’, or ‘food allergy’ in the search box.

    When you sign a prescription, allergies entered this way appear as a ‘Possible allergy’ alert.

  3. Select the allergy.

  4. Select Append comment to enter further details about the allergy or intolerance.

  5. Optional: complete any additional fields.

    Additional fields might include the type and severity of the allergy.

  6. Select Save.

  1. From  Outpatients > Clinic List > double-click on a patient's name > Patient Detail > Meds, select Allergies.

  2. If a patient has no allergies, select Set No known allergy.

    Selecting ‘no known allergy’ removes any allergies previously entered.

  3. Enter a reason for removing any allergies previously entered, then select Set No known allergy.

From  Outpatients, you don’t need to verify allergies before prescribing and administering medications.

When you prescribe a medication that a patient is allergic to, an alert appears to warn you.

  1. From  Outpatients > Clinic List > double-click on a patient's name > Patient Detail > Meds, select Allergies.

  2. To remove an allergy, select Remove.

  3. Depending on your organisation, enter a reason for removing the allergy and select Remove.

  4. To restore a removed allergy, select Restore.

  5. To save your changes, select Save.

  1. From  Outpatients > Clinic List > double-click on a patient's name > Patient Detail > Meds, select Height and Weight from the EPMA banner.

  2. Enter the height and weight.

    Nervecentre automatically calculates BMI .

  3. Select Next.

  4. Optional: enter any comments.

  5. Select Submit.

    Height, weight, and BMI are shown in the EPMA banner.

    If the height and weight are recorded in another part of Nervecentre, the recorded values populate, or update, the EPMA banner. For example: 

    • For outpatients, you can record height and weight in the observations summary from Clinical on a desktop.

    • For inpatients, you can record height and weight in observations on a mobile.