How does Medic cope with Drug formats, dosages, frequencies and other properties?
Within Medic you can build your own list of drugs indicating their properties amongst which are the formats, dosages and frequencies.
First you need to click on ‘Administration’ and then on ‘Drugs’. Press ‘Search’ to load your current list of available Drugs.
If you do not have any drugs yet created you can right-click and select ‘New’ to create your first drug. Otherwise, if the ‘Search’ returned records then you can select any one of them and right-click select ‘Edit’ to view the properties. You can also double-click to edit the record directly.
Once you are in edit mode you will see all the properties of the Drug. Have a look at the following screenshot :
You will first see the commonly used fields which are the ‘DrugCode’, ‘DrugName’, ‘Price’, ‘Remarks’ and ‘Notes’. Naturally the ‘DrugCode’ is a unique field that identifies the Drug. ‘DrugName’ is the actual name of the Drug. The remaining fields ‘Price’, ‘Remarks’ and ‘Notes’ can be utilised if required. They are not compulsory.
Next we come to the formats, dosages and frequencies.
Within formats you are able to store the many different types available for the drug in question. Examples are tablet, syrup, capsules. Then, for every type (format) used, you can fill in the dosages that apply. For example, in tablet form, this particular drug comes in the following dosages 20mg and 40mg. On the other hand, in Syrup form, this same drug comes in for example 2.5 mL and 5 mL.
Once again, for every dosage you may have different frequencies. Therefore you can define all the possible frequencies for all the dosages per format for every Drug. Examples of Frequencies are dly, bd, tds, nocte.