Medi Marshal

The Medi Marshal app has been designed and developed by McLernons to empower the patient, allowing them to order their prescriptions, particularly repeats, and access to the dispensing records held by their pharmacist.

Recognising that the patient should be at the centre of their own health care journey, and not simply an adjunct to the work of the health care professional, the Medi Marshal app puts the patient firmly at the heart of their relationship with their community pharmacist.

How it works

The Medi Marshal app has been proven to work in conjunction with the McLernons MPS dispensary management system (with the potential to make this available to users of other dispensary solutions). The patient can enrol with more than one pharmacy as we know that for reasons of convenience or emergency patients may get different pharmacy items from different pharmacies. These may all be part of the same group, or located in different areas (near the workplace, beside the family home, near a family member for whom someone is a carer, etc).

Once the registration process has been completed in the pharmacy, the patient is given a unique code to unlock the Medi Marshal app. They may use the app for themselves or for another individual who has given them permission to do so, such as an elderly family member, or it they are a professional carer.

Medi Marshal is an app which allows patients and their carers to manage their medication by providing a direct link to their pharmacy and its pharmacy dispensing system, as well as the ability to message their pharmacist with queries about their medicines and re-order their prescriptions.

It provides access to their full medicine history, useful if attending a different GP or in an out-of-hours emergency, and provides notifications when prescriptions are ready for collection as well as medicine reminders.

With up to 70% of patients not taking medication properly, poor compliance is currently the number

one cause of hospital visits in Ireland and the UK and it’s a statistic that could so easily be avoided and one that we all need to work towards changing.

The patient or their carer registers completes a Patient Registration form, produced in the pharmacy which is specific to each patient. The patient then downloads the app, and can avail of the many features of Medi Marshal.

The benefits

The immediate benefits of the Medi Marshal app is that it creates a channel of communication between the patient and the community pharmacy, giving them access to their dispensing history and control over their ordering of repeat prescriptions.

• Current medication

The patient or carer can order the medication items that are on ‘repeat prescribing’ in their pharmacy, and these will automatically be notified to the pharmacy and placed on the work schedule of the dispensary, ensuring that they are prepared and ready to be collected on the date that the patient has indicated.

• Notifications

The Medi Marshal app shows the notifications sent from the pharmacy to the patient

• Prescription History

The patient or their approved carer can view their entire prescription and medicines dispensed history, which provides a much fuller picture of a medicines regimen than the GP’s record which only shows medicines prescribed but not necessarily dispensed or taken by the patient.

This feature is particularly useful if the patient needs to access emergency or out-of-hours care, or when on holiday as it gives other health care professionals a full and clear view of the medication which the patient has been prescribed.

• Pharmacy details

The Medi Marshal app also provides the patient with details of the pharmacies and their services where the patient is registered with Medi Marshal. They can also take and send a photograph of any new prescription, thereby speeding up the time that the patient needs to spend in the pharmacy waiting for the prescription to be filled.