Our prescriptions are not clearing automatically

The prescription lifecycle is highly configurable by system administrators. Sometimes, due to a misconfiguration, prescriptions may not organically disappear from your user views even though they are considered "done".

Symptoms

Despite completing every activity in the sequence, the prescription remains on the user view/homepage, causing confusion and clutter. Given enough time the sheer number of prescriptions building up can even start to cause performance problems.

Cause

Hover over the progress button to determine what the prescription is waiting for you to do. In this example, the prescription is waiting for colelction.

Either not all of the activities or tasks that have been configured for the prescription type are being completed, or (less likely) the user view is set up in a way that it shows completed prescriptions.

The task that is at the heart of the issue can be determined by looking at one of the prescriptions that is "stuck". The clearest indication is to look at what the green "progress" button is currently expecting.

Whether the task should be completed, or if the task is surplus to requirements and should be removed, is a discussion for pharmacy management, but both avenues are discussed below.

Solutions

1. Index the PTS database.
2. Turn off bi-directional support.
   (Please do not underestimate the performance impact of this setting even if you have never heard of it before)
3. Consider whether your prescription types are set up correctly so that they clear automatically when finished. Also see how to clear lots of prescriptions at once.
4. Use a resource monitor or the SQL performance dashboard to identify the application at fault and then contact the manufacturer.
5. Use SQL performance dashboard to identify the expensive query and have IT or the manufacturer optimise it and/or reduce its frequency.
   (This issue seems to be becoming more common, please test your queries for performance at scale before rollout)
6. Consider upgrading your server hardware to the recommended PTS 5 specification.
7. In Setup > Application Settings, locate the "skip checking if PTS is online" setting (OFFLINE) and set to Yes. This tells PTS not to attempt any remote connections.