Stopping medications

🎞️ View video tutorial: Stopping medications

When you instruct a patient to stop taking a medication, you should always stop (discontinue) the prescription in the patient’s chart. This way, the patient’s active medications list accurately reflects what medications the patient is currently taking. Also, in keeping a patient’s active medications list accurate, you will not receive interaction warnings against medications the patient is no longer taking.

📌 Note: Once you sign a prescription, it can no longer be edited or deleted from the patient's chart. You can only Cancel or Stop the prescription. (For more information on cancelling a prescription entered in error, see Cancelling signed prescriptions.)

You can stop a medication from the patient's Medications list, or when creating a new prescription and choosing this patient's medications.

1. From the Start/Open menu or the Quick Menu in the patient's chart, choose Medications. If you are viewing the chart summary, you can also click the arrow in the Active Medications widget to open the Medications list. Then, beside the medication you are discontinuing, click the menu icon (3 dots) > Stop Medication.

Alternatively, from the Patient's Medications window (for example, when you are creating a prescription from an encounter), select the checkbox beside the medication and click Stop.

2. In the Stop medications window, select a Reason from the list.

📌 Note: Both the Reason and Ended at fields are mandatory. If you do not complete these, a validation error appears. If you select Other (more info text is required) under Reason, you must enter text in the More Information field.

3. The stop date defaults to today. Change the date, if necessary (for example, if the patient reports they stopped taking it prior to today).

4. Click Stop. Or, if you want to stop this medication and create a new prescription click Stop & Create New RX.

5. If you selected Stop & Create New RX, the prescription pad appears and the stopped medication is included on the prescription but is crossed out to indicate it is being discontinued. Complete the prescription as you normally would.

6. The discontinued medication is moved from the Current list of medications to the All and Past list of medications and is marked with a stop icon and Stopped banner. To see additional details such as the reason the medication was stopped, click the arrow icon.

📌 Note: The stopped icon and banner do not appear for medications that were externally prescribed.

7. If you stopped the medication from the Prescriptions area of an encounter, the stopped medication is shown in the Assessment and Plan section of the encounter.