Pharmacies Database
Documentation Copyright © 2024 by Adrian Starzynski
Your OSCAR system will come with a blank list of preferred pharmacies, meaning you will have to either add each one manually or have your OSCAR Service Provider (OSP) import a list through the back-end.
As with specialists most users will curate their own list of pharmacies that their patients attend. If you curate it yourself the list will be easy to manage and up to date.
However at times you just want to quickly prepopulate the pharmacies for your region.
You could send a .csv list of pharmacies to your OSP and ask them to import it into your OSCAR pharmacies table (“pharmacyInfo” table). You will have to modify the .csv file by adding the missing columns because this is required for the pharmacyInfo table.
Run this RBT to export your pharmacyInfo table so you can work with it. Immediately store a copy of the original so you can revert in case. Then you can work with the copy which then can replace the pharmacyInfo table to update your OSCAR pharmacies list/preferred pharmacies database.
Different OSCAR versions may have additional columns in this table; you can check what columns your system has by running a custom query under Administration>Reports>Query By Example>in the Enter a Query field, enter (without the quotes): “select * from pharmacyInfo”
| recordID | ID | name | address | city | province | postalCode | phone1 | phone2 | fax | serviceLocationIdentifier | notes | addDate | status |
|---|
Each pharmacyInfo table has these columns. Certain versions may have additional columns:
- recordID: any number, normally sequential (required)
- name: pharmacy name (required)
- address: pharmacy street address
- city: pharmacy city
- province: pharmacy province
- postalCode: pharmacy postal code
- phone1: pharmacy phone1
- phone2: pharmacy phone2
- fax: pharmacy fax (required)
- email: pharmacy email
- notes: any you want to add
- addDate: the date/time that the pharmacy was added, in computer time format like 2022-01-05 12:17:15
- status: if the pharmacy is active it is 1, if it is deleted the status is 0. Deleted pharmacies don’t get really deleted; their status just changes to “0” so they get hidden from the pharmacies list in the front-end.
- serviceLocationIdentifier: leave this blank
The recordID is how the system links preferred pharmacies to patients. If you already have pharmacies in your system and you import a new list (with new recordID for each pharmacy), then all the patients with current preferred pharmacies will be unlinked from that pharmacy since the recordID field was changed.
recordID cannot be changed from the front-end of the EMR (only through the table).
As long as you preserve the recordID field, the patients linked to that pharmacy will stay. Be careful – if you replace a pharmacy but keep recordID value the same as original, all the patients linked to the original recordID will now have the new pharmacy!!
If you want to bulk-edit the existing pharmacies, preserve the recordID fields of the pharmacies you want to keep, and then have your OSP override the pharmacyInfo table with your modified .csv file. You can also add pharmacies to your spreadsheet, and create new recordID numbers (no patient will be linked to the new recordID’s).