SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
The Department of Health and Social Services is planning a move toward paperless prescriptions within the next year.

The Department of Health and Social Services is planning to move towards a paperless prescription program by late next year as part of its prescription drug monitoring program. By going paperless, patients in the Northwest Territories will no longer take a physical prescription to their pharmacists. The change is intended to curb prescription alterations and forgery. - Cody Punter/NNSL photo

Paperless prescriptions are a method of dispensing prescription drugs without the patient ever physically having a piece of paper in his or her hand.

The health department plans to make this change as part of its impending prescription drug monitoring program, which is aimed at decreasing prescription drug abuse in the territory. The program will allow the department to collect dispensing and prescribing information from pharmacists across NWT and from there the government will be able to monitor this information for irregularities.

According to Jim Corkal, chief clinical adviser for the department, paperless prescriptions are intended to discourage prescription drug abuse.

"As far as it goes with prescription monitoring, one of the problems that can happen within a very small number of patients who have a prescription in their hand is there are alterations to prescriptions," he explained.

"The whole role of this is to decrease harm from controlled substances."

Pharmacists unaware of impending change

No Yellowknife pharmacists Yellowknifer contacted were willing to comment on paperless prescriptions because they didn't know anything about the government's plans.

Corkal said the program is in early planning stages and the timeline for rolling it out is "towards the end of the 2015 calendar year," but he added this could change.

Range Lake MLA Daryl Dolynny, who owns Shoppers Drug Mart, said he hadn't been aware the department was planning to move toward paperless prescriptions either, but he expressed optimism about the program's potential.

"A paperless environment would be beneficial for seeing multiple physicians . this will look at curbing that illicit behaviour and that could be a positive outcome," he said.

Dolynny added he will be interested to see how the department plans to roll it out across different regions of the territory because different pharmacists use different programs to manage their prescription databases.

Corkal couldn't say how the program will roll out or how it work without physicians writing out the prescriptions for patients, but he did say it won't initially be electronic because the department is not using electronic medical records in every region of the territory yet.

"The finer nuances, we don't know at this point," he said, adding the program could start up using fax or some other form of communication.

He also couldn't say whether paperless prescriptions would roll out across the territory as a whole or be implemented on a regional basis or how much the program will cost.

"We are just in the early phases of putting this legislation in," he explained.

"This is just one spoke in the wheel and hopefully we will get there in 2015."

Health and Social Services will start implementing the prescription drug monitoring program after legislative assembly passes an amendment to the Pharmacy Act, which has passed two readings and is heading to Committee of the Whole this session for review.