Pharmacy Discharge Process

When a patient is discharged from hospital, nine times out of ten they have been receiving prescription drugs as an inpatient. Once that patient has been discharged, the pharmacy must cancel their prescriptions. Sometimes patients slip through the gaps and the drugs are prescribed, even when they’ve left the hospital.

One UK trust told us that before the use of RPA, if the patient was discharged early they would attempt to courier drugs to the patient, an additional cost to the hospital. In other cases, they’d attempt to return the drugs to stock but this wasn’t always possible, so some drugs were wasted.

With the use of RPA, what once was a very manual process, is now a completely automated process. Prescriptions are cancelled on a rolling basis, meaning there’s less chance that a prescription will slip through the net and be prescribed for a patient that has actually left the hospital. Saving not only time but crucially preventing drugs from being dispensed that are not needed.

The benefits