Active Ingredient Prescribing is here!

What is Active Ingredient Prescribing?

If you prescribe medicines for your patients regularly you may have heard about the upcoming Active Ingredient Prescribing (AIP) government initiative. We are extremely excited to announce that we have released updates to prescribing in Gentu to comply with the 1 February 2021 AIP mandate.

The goal of Active Ingredient Prescribing is to ensure consistent and standardised medicines information on prescriptions by stating the active ingredients of the drug, ultimately providing patients with the means to assess and understand what active ingredients they are being prescribed.

Patients will be able to easily identify the active ingredients they are prescribed, with the aim of reducing the risk of people taking multiple doses of the same active ingredient from differently branded medicines.

The Department of Health has changed legislation to require the inclusion of active ingredients on all PBS and RPBS prescriptions, except for:

• Handwritten prescriptions;
• Paper based medication charts in the residential aged care sector;
• Medicinal items with four or more active ingredients;
• Other items excluded for safety or practicality reasons.

What does this mean for my practice?

Gentu has now been upgraded for Active Ingredient Prescribing, meaning your prescribers are automatically compliant with this new government legislation!

Gentu has always referenced active ingredient and generic medications within the software and when printing prescriptions for patients.

To further comply with AIP legislation, brand information is now shown when brand names are matched in medication workflows. Prescribers can determine for themselves if the brand name is clinically necessary to print on the scripts.

When searching for active ingredients or generic choices where brands are not bio-similar, all brand options will be shown in search for the item. Gentu will prompt users to include brands when printing the script, although this decision remains at the discretion of the prescriber.

Custom medications can continue to be prescribed from Gentu, however, the suffix (free text) will be added to the printed script immediately following the medication to comply with the AIP legislative requirements.

Where can I find more information?

For more information on AIP including PDF support materials, please see the Department of Health's webpage below.

• https://www.pbs.gov.au/info/general/active-ingredient-prescribing

For a further look at creating scripts in Gentu, please see our Prescribing article.