Patients can now leave your rooms with a prescription in hand for some blood and breast cancer medications.
Some cancer drug prescriptions that required submission of paper forms, prescriptions and test results to Services Australia, or an upload of these documents to Health Professional Online Services (HPOS) can now be assessed and authorised in real time.
From July 1, prescribers can request authorisation by answering questions on Services Australia’s Online PBS Authorities (OPA) System and will receive “immediate authority approval”.
The medicines to be included under this new authorisation system are for chronic myelomonocytic leukaemia (CMML) – initial treatment, myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) – initial treatment and continuing treatment, acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) – maintenance therapy – initial treatment, chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML) – initial treatment and first continuing treatment, metastatic (stage IV) HER2 positive breast cancer – initial treatment, and early HER2 positive breast cancer – initial adjuvant treatment.
A full list of the medicines can be found on the PBS website.
The PBS has warned that “unfortunately, the PBS listings for all of these medicines cannot be updated at one time. The Department of Health is working to update all of the relevant PBS listings as quickly as possible.”
If you’d prefer to use the post or upload documents as before, you still can. The above changes are an additional option. While the wording of eligibility criteria on the OPA system might have changed, the eligibility criteria itself has not.
