Drug & Allergy Interaction Checking

Gentu offers the Integrated Medicines Information (IMI) service, which automatically checks drug interactions in realtime as you create prescriptions.

IMI is based on the Medi-Span by Wolters Kluwer drug database. Gentu offers this service in order to:

• Increase your patients’ safety by screening for interactions between any new or previously prescribed medications.
• Check for interactions between as many medications as you need in one search.
• Improve decision making with cross-sensitivity screening between drugs, allergens, and your patient’s known allergies.
• The severity of the alert is informed by the severity of any allergy stored in your patient’s data. 

IMI is an optional add-on to your Gentu subscription, and is offered on a per-provider basis.

Activate Integrated Medicines Information

To activate the IMI service:

1. Navigate to Settings > Manage Users
2. Click on your username (or the doctor's username)
3. Select the Integrated Medicines Information tab.
4. Click Activate.
   

You will be presented with a pop-up window detailing the Integrated Medicines Information disclaimer.

Please read the disclaimer carefully. We strongly recommend that you also read the full terms & conditions which are linked in the disclaimer.

If you accept the terms & conditions, click Activate to proceed.

Activating IMI will also automatically email you a copy of the terms & conditions document (to the email address that you use as your Gentu login).

Deactivate Integrated Medicines Information

After activating Integrated Medicines Information, the Activate button will change to Deactivate.

You can deactivate IMI at any time by returning to this page and selecting Deactivate.

Integrated Medicines Information settings

After activating Integrated Medicines Information, you will be presented with further options.

Interaction severity alert

IMI's drug interaction checking will alert you in realtime when there are interactions between drugs which are being prescribed to a patient.

You can set the alert threshold by selecting an option from the Alert me when a clinical interaction is... drop down menu.

By default, the alert threshold is set to Major or Moderate.

Override reason

Under the Additional Settings heading, you can toggle the override reason setting.

When toggled on, you will not be able to prescribe a medication with a flagged interaction until you have manually overridden the interaction.

Please see below for more information on overrides.

Using Integrated Medicines Information

After activating IMI, the drug interaction checking will occur in realtime as you prescribe medications.

For information on the prescribing workflow, please see the Prescribing article.

When you add new medications for a patient, Gentu will check:

• Interactions between this medication and any medications previously saved to the patient
  • This includes deactivated medications.
  • Gentu will continue to check interactions for deactivated medications up to 12 months past the deactivation date.
• Interactions between all medications added at the same time (if there are two or more).
• Interactions between the currently selected medication(s) and allergen agents added to the patients' Adverse Reactions list.

If interactions are present, they will be listed to the right of the prescribing window.

Select an override reason from the drop down menu.

If you choose Other, you will be prompted to enter additional information.

Press Override to save the override.

Once all overrides have been applied, you can press Prescribe to print the prescription.

Authority requests

IMI allows you to provide Authority overrides for any PBS drug, including Restricted drugs.

1. After selecting a drug, you will see either the Authority or Other Authority button.       
2. Clicking this will open the Authority window, where you can enter the details.
   
3. Press Save to confirm.
   
4. You can then select Prescribe as normal to print the prescription.

Consumer Medicines Information

Gentu has just released both Product Information (PI) and Consumer Medicines Information (CMI) fact sheets for our Integrated Medicines Information users.

After adding a new medication when prescribing, you can access PI and CMI documents in the top right by selecting Medication Info.

If there are no PI or CMI documents available for the selected drug, the drop-down will be greyed out.