Periodically medications may be withdrawn from the market and be unavailable to pharmacies for a number of reasons, including:
- FDA recall/approval-revocation of a medication for safety or efficacy reasons;
- Manufacturers of brand-name medications may cease production for financial reasons;
- Supply-chain issues may result in long term (or permanent) unavailability of a medication
Because prescribers may still want to look up these products, either because they want to add a historical medication to a patient chart or because they prefer to look up a medication by a more familiar (but unavailable) brand name, Cerbo does not automatically remove medication definitions from your medication database just because they are no longer available to be dispensed. However, to help prevent prescribers from accidentally writing scripts that pharmacies cannot fill, we have introduced a warning that displays when you start writing a prescription.
If we detect that the script you're trying to write is flagged as discontinued or otherwise not listed as an active medication, it will show the following message:
(It appears that this medication may be out of production or unavailable to pharmacies and may be ineligible for eRxing.)
This warning will not prevent you from writing the prescription (or faxing/printing it) but it's likely that if you attempt to eRx the script without selecting an alternate medication the script will likely be rejected by the e-prescribing network.
In addition to the warning, the prescribing screen may present you with a list of identical products which are still commercially available. If there are other brands or generic products that are still "active", it will list these suggestions:
Clicking on a suggested product will reload the prescribing screen with the selected replacement medication. Note that it will not copy over any prescribing profiles you have defined for the original discontinued medication.
Rarely, you may see a suggested replacement that is not clickable (and remains in red text):
This indicates that there is at least one identical medication concept on the market, but that for some reason the replacement value isn't available in your medication library. In most scenarios, this is just because your practice's medication library hasn't been reloaded recently. To correct this, you can just go to Admin > Manage > Medications and click the "Sync new Rxs from Master Database" button:
** Note: Manually defined medication concepts (compound medications, or medications that were otherwise defined by your practice in the Medication Management window) will generally not have their status checked, so the system is not able to determine if they are still active medication options.