Drug Count Settings

The ALIS Drug Count is a great way for your team to keep electronic records of changes to resident medication order quantities. This guide covers all the settings available in ALIS to tailor this experience to your organization's specific needs.

To find Drug Count Settings, go to Settings > Medications. It is first necessary for the ALIS team to turn on the feature for your company. If it has been turned on, you will find a tab in your Medications Settings titled Drug Count.

If you need to enable the Drug Count to a specific community, the only item here will be the Enable button. Click Enable to get started.

Packed Order Drug Count

This setting supports the scenario where a pharmacy fills a package of partial pills. A common example of this would be half pills added to a bubble pack. In this example, it makes the most sense for your team to count the bubbles themselves, not the number of whole pills. 

When you have this Enabled, you must go the extra step for the relevant orders to set the order quantity "As 1 Packed Unit". This is available in the add/edit/process order page in the Scheduling & Dosage section, in the menu titled Packaging as shown below:

Make sure that the Dose field is correct for the selected Drug Unit of Measurement contained in each bubble pack. In the example above, there are 0.5 tablets in each dose. The count will treat each package bubble (each half tablet) as 1 unit to be counted.

Create Separate Counts

Here the default option is 'Community', which refers to one counting event to be done for all orders for which you track quantity. If you leave the setting on 'Community', your team only has the option to count all orders that are enabled for the Drug Count. This is most likely appropriate if your community is small.

You can also separate the counts by Med Cart, Floor, Hallway, or if you are also tracking quantity for some non-narcotic orders, you can also split by narcotics vs. non-narcotics. This setting allows staff to count one group of the orders at a time.

• Med Cart Settings are found in the Medications tab of Medication Settings, and are then assigned on a per-resident basis. To read more about Medications Settings, read this article: Medications Settings
• Floors and Hallways are set in the community's Floor Plan. To read more about setting up your Floor Plan, read this article: How to Configure a Community Floor Plan
• If you choose to separate counts by Med Cart, Floor, or Hallway, you can then also separate them further by narcotics vs. non-narcotics. 

Drug Destruction Methods

The default options here are 'Mixed with cat litter or coffee grounds' and 'Transferred to medical waste container'. One of the options here is always required if someone on your team logs a medication destruction. This setting gives you the option to add other methods or to disable the default methods.

Related Articles:

Enabling medications for the Drug Count

Performing a Drug Count