Online Prescribing Formulary

Online pharmacy is highly regulated in the UK. The Care Quality Commission (CQC), General Medical Council, General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC), Nursing and Midwifery Council, Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), Healthcare Improvement Scotland, Healthcare Inspectorate Wales, and the Regulation and Quality Improvement Authority all work together sharing intelligence about online providers to ensure patient safety. 

Over the past decade, the GPhC and CQC have taken many pharmacies and clinics offline for not meeting various requirements. We have performed an analysis of openly published data and created the chart below highlighting the various reasons for non-compliance:

HubNet.io is dedicated to addressing each of these aspects, the first of which is the largest part, clinical governance, for this we have created our Digital Back Office solution which entirely automates this process. The next piece of this pie we have been addressed is service quality. Enforcement action has been taken by the GPhC for many online distance selling pharmacies. One common reason for this is the DSP has a prescribing service which prescribes high-risk medicines. For this reason, we have created a risk assessment formulary of medicines that can be offered online a sample of which can be seen below.

This has list has been created taking advice from the BMA about potential medicines which should be blacklisted online and the GPhC Best Practice documentation. Interested in accessing the OPF? You get full access to the database by subscribing to the hubnet.