Use case for community pharmacy managing aspects of a patient’s care

Brief description

As part of the move to reduce workloads on general practice, certain aspects of patient care are being moved to community pharmacists. This may be where a GP has handed an aspect of patient care over to the community pharmacist or where the community pharmacist has been directly commissioned to provide the service. To be able to safely treat their patients, the pharmacist requires access to their medical record.

Use case justification

Clinical and administration:

  • Access to accurate information at the point of care reducing the opportunity for errors to occur.
  • Reduction in transcription between systems and paper to IT, leading to a reduction in prescribing errors.
  • Reduction in clinical time wasted, away from the patient, collecting and collating information.
  • Reduction in clinical time wasted, away from the patient, manually updating IT systems.
  • Reducing the paper flow through departments by utilising the system’s workflow to manage tasks using staff time efficiently.

Patient-focused:

  • Security of patient information is maintained and improved through the reduction of paper-based ‘patient identifiable documents’ in use within departments.
  • Increased patient/clinician time due to reduction in clinician time spent collecting and transcribing information away from the patient.
  • Increased patient safety due to the reduction in manual transcription errors.
  • Better patient experience as they are not being asked for information which should already be available to the clinician.

Primary actors

  • Pharmacist
  • Pharmacy system
  • GP Connect.
  • GP clinical system

Secondary actors

  • Patient

Triggers

  • Patient attends a community pharmacist for treatment.

Preconditions

  • The patient’s details have been verified and entered on the pharmacy system upon attendance.
  • The pharmacist has the correct/appropriate system access rights.
  • The patient’s GP has agreed to share patient information via GP Connect.
  • The patient allows this shared information to be viewed/used by the pharmacist.
  • Electronic interactions between pharmacy system/GP Connect/GP clinical system have been correctly configured.

Postconditions

  • On success
    • The patient’s medical record is made available to the pharmacist.
  • Guaranteed
    • The pharmacist will treat the patient based on the information available.

Basic flow with alternative and exception flows

Step Description
Step 1 Patient attends the pharmacy.
Step 2 The pharmacist identifies need to establish the patient’s medication history.
Step 3 The pharmacist accesses the pharmacy system to retrieve GP patient record history. The pharmacy system requests the GP patient record from GP Connect.
Step 4 GP Connect requests GP patient record from the GP clinical system.
Step 5

GP clinical system provides the GP patient record to GP Connect.

The GP patient record will include:

  • Medications

  • Allergies

  • Vaccinations (outside scope of current release)

  • Conditions/Problems (outside scope of current release)

  • Observation (outside scope of current release)

  • Procedures (outside scope of current release)

  • Encounters (outside scope of current release)

  • Investigations (outside scope of current release)

  • Documents (outside scope of current release)
Step 6 GP Connect presents the GP patient record to the pharmacy system.
Step 7 The pharmacy system presents the GP patient record to the pharmacist.