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Minor ailments wizard

PHOXBook pharmacy portal (rx.phoxbook.ca): Assess and prescribe for eligible conditions in one guided flow, with a signed record and prescriber letters at the end.

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Written by William

What it is

The Minor Ailments wizard walks you through a full assessment for an eligible condition — from selecting the ailment to a signed clinical record, in six phases. Internally the wizard tracks nine steps, but a few phases group more than one step, so you'll only ever see six stops on the progress bar.

Phase

Covers

1. Ailment

Select the condition and confirm the goals of therapy

2. Patient

Confirm the patient, consent, medication history, and allergies

3. Assessment

The assessment questions, then the red-flag summary

4. Treatment

Select the recommended medication

5. Prescription

Build the prescription — strength, dose, and quantity

6. Finalize

Monitoring plan, follow-up plan, then review and sign

Starting from an appointment

A booked minor-ailment appointment offers Start assessment in its Start step (and Start Minor Ailment in the prompt after check-in), which opens this wizard with the condition and the patient already filled in when they can be, or reopens the draft already started from that appointment (Open assessment). A dispensing-system patient profile has a Start Minor Ailment button that opens the wizard with that patient loaded, leaving the condition to you. See Starting a Minor Ailment Assessment from an Appointment.

Phase 1: Ailment

Search or browse the list of eligible conditions. Selecting one opens an info panel — about, symptoms, your role, goals, red flags, and treatment classes — so you can confirm it's the right fit before continuing.

Phase 2: Patient

Search for the patient by name against your pharmacy's connected dispensing system, then pull their record.

Patient search needs a PhoxHub connection. Patient search and the record pull both go through PhoxHub, the bridge to your pharmacy's dispensing system (Kroll, Fillware, or Nexxsys/PharmaClik). The connection is set up by your head office or PharmaGuide; it cannot be set up from the pharmacy portal. With a PhoxHub connection, Minor ailments in the side menu opens the minor ailments page, with a Workflow card (start a new assessment) and a Dashboard card (the assessments list). Without one, it opens the assessments list directly.

Starting from an appointment works without it. From an appointment, Continue without linking uses the patient as the booking recorded them. A banner says the patient is not linked to the dispensing system, so there is no medication history, allergy list or prescriber on file. You must record the allergies the patient reports before you can leave this step.

Once you pull the record, the wizard shows a generated patient story and medication history, and confirms consent. An allergy banner appears when the connected dispensing system has allergy data on file — this depends on which system your pharmacy uses, so an empty banner doesn't always mean no known allergies.

Phase 3: Assessment

Two parts:

  1. Assessment questions: multiple-choice questions specific to the selected condition. Your answers build a clinical note as you go, so you can see exactly what will appear in the record.

  2. Red flag summary: the red flags your answers raised. It reads "Referral indicated", "No red flags raised" or "Red flags not yet assessed". You can tick any remaining flags. Any red flag means referral, and Next stays greyed out until every red flag is assessed.

Phase 4: Treatment

The wizard shows a grouped table of treatment options. Each is tagged Recommended or Not recommended based on your answers, and an alert above the table suggests referral when the case may be outside the minor-ailment scope. Click Select on one or more treatments. The tags are advisory: nothing in the wizard blocks you from choosing a different option.

Phase 5: Prescription

Pick the regimen for the medication you selected, and the wizard builds the SIG (dosing instructions), quantity, and days' supply for you. A prescriber-notification letter is prepared from these details.

Phase 6: Finalize

Three steps in this phase:

  1. Monitoring: check off the monitoring points that apply; the wizard writes the monitoring narrative for the record.

  2. Follow-up: set a follow-up interval and check off the relevant follow-up recommendations.

  3. Sign and submit: add your signature (E-signature or Signature pad). Your Pharmacist name and Licence number (OCP) fill in from My Profile, and you can change them for this assessment. If your profile has no name or licence number, those fields start empty; the portal never uses your login email as your name. This generates two documents:

    • Prescriber notification: a letter for the patient's doctor

    • Physician summary: a one-page summary of the assessment

Both letters are ready as soon as you sign, with no separate rendering step. Submitting also downloads the record as a PDF.

Every medication on them must be a finished prescription: directions, plus a quantity or a number of days, from the Prescription details step. If one isn't, for example a drug picked earlier and never filled in, the letter isn't generated and PhoxBook names the drug. Complete it on Prescription details, or remove it, then generate the letter again. A drug's reference dose is never printed as its directions.

Saving drafts and completing

You don't have to finish a wizard in one sitting. Your progress is saved as a draft each time you select Next; changes on the current step are lost if you leave without pressing Next. Come back to it later from the assessments list to pick up where you left off. Once you sign off in Phase 6, the document's status changes to complete.

The assessments list

The Dashboard card on the minor ailments page (or, without PhoxHub, Minor ailments in the side menu) opens Minor ailment assessments, a list of every assessment for your pharmacy: in-progress drafts and completed records alike, most recently updated first. Filter with All, In progress and Completed, or start one with New assessment. Each row offers:

  • Open: continue a draft or view a completed record

  • Start a copy: start a new visit with the same starting point (a copy always begins as a fresh draft and doesn't carry over the original's letters)

  • Download record, and Open the originally rendered PDF for a completed record

  • Open appointment, when the assessment came from an appointment

  • Delete

Tips

  • If patient search comes back empty, check with your pharmacy manager that the PhoxHub connection is working.

  • The treatment tags in Phase 4 are a guide, not a rule; use your clinical judgment.

  • Press Next before you leave a step; that is when your progress is saved.

Need help?

Open the Help Center from the ? icon in the header, or press Shift + ? for keyboard shortcuts.

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