Electronic Prescriptions and the Active Script List

Electronic prescriptions arrived quickly and settled in quietly. Most pharmacies handle tokens competently now, and the counter workflow has adjusted. What has not gone away is the time cost around the edges. The lost token, the patient who cannot see why their repeat is not showing, the call asking whether a script is ready.

Key facts: there are three things a patient can present, and they behave differently. A token is a single prescription. An Active Script List is a way of holding many of them. Barcoded paper still has to physically arrive. Most of the friction at your counter comes from patients not knowing which of the three they have.

How an electronic prescription actually works

The mechanics are simple and worth stating plainly, because a lot of counter confusion comes from patients half-understanding them.

The patient receives a unique token, usually a QR code, by SMS or email. That token is the secure key to the prescription. They present it at any pharmacy that supports electronic prescriptions, the pharmacy scans it, and the medicine is dispensed.

One token is one prescription. If the patient has repeats, the pharmacy sends a new token for the next repeat, which they present next time. This is the single most common source of patient confusion, because people expect the original SMS to keep working indefinitely.

What the Active Script List changes

The Active Script List is a token management solution which securely stores electronic prescriptions in one place. It removes the need for a patient to keep track of individual tokens sent by SMS or email.

It has one important limit. The ASL can show barcoded paper prescriptions, but the patient still needs to bring the barcoded paper prescription to the pharmacy to receive that medicine. Seeing it on a list is not the same as being able to dispense from it.

What the patient has	What it holds	What it needs at the counter
Token (SMS or email)	One prescription	The token itself, scanned
Active Script List	Their electronic prescriptions together, plus a view of barcoded paper	Patient consent for the pharmacy to access the list
Barcoded paper	One prescription	The physical paper, brought in

For patients on several medicines, the ASL removes a genuine burden. For your staff, it changes the counter conversation from “have you got the SMS” to a consent step. That is slower the first time and faster after that.

The scale this operates at

Adoption is not in question. Over 219 million electronic prescriptions had been issued since May 2020, by more than 85,958 prescribers, on figures reported in April 2024. Separately, the National Prescription Delivery Service supports the exchange of nearly 300 million prescriptions each year.

Those are infrastructure numbers rather than pharmacy numbers, but the point stands. This is the default channel now, not an experiment.

Where it still costs you time

Electronic prescribing removed paper handling. It did not remove the questions, and some of them moved onto the phone.

The lost token. A patient deletes the SMS or changes phones. Resolving it takes a staff member away from the bench.

Repeat confusion. The patient tries to reuse a spent token and concludes the system is broken.

Consent friction. ASL access needs the patient’s consent, and the first-time setup lands at your busiest counter moments.

Status calls. This is the one that shows up in our own data. In a Krepko beta at an Australian pharmacy, prescription inquiries were 24.1 percent of captured requests, the third largest category after delivery and pickup confirmations. Roughly a quarter of what people wanted was information about a script.

What is worth fixing

Explain the repeat, once, properly. A short, consistent line at handover about the new token for repeats prevents a large share of return questions.

Offer ASL setup deliberately. Do it at a quiet moment, for the patients who benefit most. Those are usually people on multiple long-term medicines, not whoever happens to be at the counter rush.

Get script status off the live phone queue. Status questions are high volume, low complexity and highly repetitive. They are also the ones most likely to interrupt dispensing, which is a documented risk we covered in pharmacy phone interruptions.

Check what your dispense software already exposes. Several systems can send a ready-for-collection notification. Proactive contact is almost always cheaper than answering the same question inbound.

Where Krepko fits

We build Emily, an AI voice agent for Australian pharmacies. She answers routine calls using your pharmacy’s own data and hands anything clinical or complex to a pharmacist.

Prescription status is the clearest case for this. It is a question with a factual answer, asked constantly, and it currently competes with dispensing for the same staff attention. In our 30 day audit of one Australian pharmacy, 74.9 percent of inbound calls went unanswered, with 99.1 percent arriving during opening hours. A quarter of the requests we later captured were about scripts.

Answering those reliably does not require a person. It requires access to the right data and a system that escalates anything clinical. For a wider view of where AI is genuinely useful in a pharmacy, and where it is not, see AI in pharmacy. You can see how Emily works at krepko.com.au.