My son David (who is the main house house call for his Hong Kong practice) has discovered that The Customer Orders facility can be used without having an HL7 Pharmacy or Cubex machine.  That is, a mobile vet can create customer orders that will be fulfilled by in-house staff from the in-house pharmacy.

Since this is at the Discussion stage, rather than provide a dry specification here, I have chosen to quote his reply to my email asking for clarification of what tweaks he wanted. It is as follows:

I've spent a day or two using the system and thinking about what it needs - and it's so close to being perfect I think it would only take a couple of tweaks and be ready to roll out. This might also have much more widespread application than the external ordering. It's common in a lot of clinics for clients to order stuff to pickup with the vet then the staff need to prepare.
 
These are the alterations I would make:
1. Don't automatically invoice.
At the moment if there is a pending customer order for a client, the moment I make a new invoice for the client the system will automatically try to invoice that customer order.
This doesn't work if I'm in consult, make up a customer order, then invoice the bill for the consult.
Maybe instead the system could flash up a question" "Do you want to invoice the outstanding Customer Order Y/N"
This way we could process invoices without being forced to do the customer order.
It's also a problem if I've placed an order that isn't in stock - as we can't bill the client for anything else until we process that Customer order (or delete it and put it in again after we invoice for other stuff).
 
2. Allow Drug Label creation
Allow a label to be made for the dispensed drugs on the order
 
3. Allow prescription creation
Follows on from 2, ie allow the new prescription button
 
4. Let the staff know the order is there.
- maybe somehow send an alert to certain staff - like a little icon in the corner similar to messaging showing there's an order awaiting processing?
- or alternately just populate a to-do list on a worklist with "Outstanding orders"
 
I think with these additions it would be perfect, but even at the moment it's very workable and since we've started using it it's been much better than our old email system, it avoids constantly bombarding the office with orders, and it keeps a track of which orders have been placed.
 
It's really working well.

Regards, Tim G