Non-Formulary medications are those medications that the facility does not normally stock or encourage the use of, but will not substitute their use with a formulary item. In this situation, the patient will either supply the medication or the pharmacy will purchase a limited supply for the patient’s stay. These medications must be flagged in a certain way to ensure that they are checked for interactions appropriately yet remain hidden from regular OM ordering screens.

Verification of NF orders

Non-Formulary medications ordered via reconciliation will flow to the pharmacy module as an NF medication that will have no interaction or allergy checking available. When no therapeutic interchange can occur for the non-formulary item, the pharmacist will need to change the NF medication order received from the OM module to the corresponding non-formulary drug dictionary item at the verification step (as these have been restricted from the OM ordering screen lookups).

Order Type Choice

Since Order Type will determine if a medication will show up on a refill list, it is important to determine whether the patient or the hospital will be providing the medication supply.

If the patient will be supplying the medication it is important to change the order type to POM to reflect that the pharmacy is not supplying the medication. This will prevent the medication from showing up on refill lists.

If the pharmacy will be purchasing a limited supply to provide to the patient for the duration of the hospital stay, then the pharmacist must choose the normal order type used for usual dispensing of medications.

Ordering Tab

The facility mnemonic must be added to the “Restrict to Ordering Site” field in the Ordering Tab of the drug dictionary item.

Customer-Defined Screen Tab

The Non-Formulary section of the Customer-Defined Screen tab will need to be set to “Y” in order for the medication to be hidden from OM ordering screens.

Revision History

A printed copy of this document may not reflect the current electronic version. Any printed copies should always be checked against the electronic version