Medications Settings

The ALIS eMAR organizes your community's med pass, generates important documents, and keeps your team informed of important medication details. The Medications Settings page allows us to control order scheduling functionality and more. 

This article explains the details of the first tab labeled Medications. To learn about Drug Count settings, read this article: Drug Count Settings.

Please take a look at our articles and videos about Medication Administration, Medication Management, and Pharmacy for more detailed information about the eMAR. 

Click the Settings link at the top right corner of your ALIS screen, and click Medications. 

• Only users with Administrator roles can access this.
• These are set at the community level. Contact us if you need help copying your settings between multiple communities!

Med Pass Time Frames

Here we have a way to dictate what time the four daily med pass time frames will begin. The four med pass times frames in ALIS cover the entire 24 hours of a day.

If you make any changes to when the med pass time frames begin or update the meal times, click Save to complete your changes.

Sort Med Pass by Administration Times

This is the most popular way to sort the Pass Meds page. It will show the residents in order of their earliest unrecorded medication. 

Default Service Level

Most Assisted Living licenses "Administer" medications for residents, but there are several exceptions to this.

Select the option here that is most common for your resident medications to avoid having to change the  Service Level section every time you add a medication in ALIS!

Click Save for your change to take effect the next time you add a medication.

Variance Threshold

This determines how long before and after a scheduled med pass time the will order display as administered "on time". You can have different settings here based on how many times daily a medication is scheduled.

Most organizations leave this on the default "1 hr" setting for each medication frequency shown here.

For more information about how this affects your med pass, read this article: Why does a medication say "WAIT" or "LATE"?

Will Try Later

With this enabled, there is an additional button on the Record Med Pass page, to the left of "Passed".

This option does not impact any medication administration records. It does not communicate a med passer's intention to try later to any part of ALIS.

The purpose of this is to provide an option to click for a med passer in the moment to make sure they have checked all orders showing on their Record Med Pass page. Most organizations disable this.

Medication Tags

These tags allow us to display badges next to a medication on the Record Med Pass page for med passers, and allow us to filter orders by the tags in reports. The default options here are the most common, but you can disable most of them and create additional tags if needed. 

Physician Orders Disclaimer and Signature Lines

These settings allow you to customize the bottom margin of each page of your resident Physician Orders documents. 

You might add a Disclaimer here to communicate important details about pharmacy policies. You can also decide if you want to disable or add more signature lines to the POs if they are ever printed and signed on paper.

Medication Carts

If your community organizes your medications on multiple carts, add the cart names here.

For each resident you can then select which of your carts their orders will be contained. This can be done on the Pharmacies and Manage Orders pages.

Informational Order Types

Set your Informational Order Types here. To learn more about Informationals, read this article: Informational Orders.

Community Informationals

Community Informationals allow you to add Informational Orders one time, then easily apply in bulk to groups of your residents, and easily add to new residents' charts upon move-in. 

Specialty Settings

• History Update Threshold: The default for this is "Yesterday", and this limits how far back your Med Techs can update administration records in the past using Med Pass History. For more information about Med Pass History, read this article: Med Pass History.
• Bulk Med Pass: This is very uncommonly enabled and is used during the training process to quickly generate training data in med pass records. 
• Bulk Med Pass On Time: Equally uncommon as above, this is leveraged during the training and onboarding process to quickly populate MARs for demonstration.
• Vitals Validation: This will restrict the values of the vitals entered at your community with the purpose of preventing erroneous records due to mistypes. This mostly guards against vitals records with missing or additional digits added by mistake.
• Administration Notes: There are some pharmacy integrations that may prevent the order instructions from being editable, so you can turn this setting on to provide an additional field below Instructions called Administration Notes. This way, your team can still add some custom instructions if needed. When turned on, these are available for Routine medications, PRNs, and Treatments.

Medication Exceptions

When an order is not Passed as directed, there are a few other options on Pass Meds that are considered "exceptions". We can set up a list of reasons available for when the med passer clicks Other on the Pass Meds page. 

• First this feature must be enabled by the ALIS team as an entitlement and then enabled on your Company Settings page for your community. Contact us to set this up!
• Once enabled, you'll find a customizable list toward the bottom of your Medications Settings page.

Related Articles:

Navigating the Pass Meds Page

Why does a medication say "WAIT" or "LATE"?