Guide

Write a prescription in Gale

Summary

Open the patient's chart, then Prescribing. Fill the drug, the directions, the dispense quantity and days supply, pick a pharmacy your practice already holds, then select Draft prescription. Drafting signs nothing and sends nothing. Signing happens on the prescribing service's own screens: Gale opens a signing session and hands you across. Nothing reaches a pharmacy today, because Gale is not connected to the pharmacy network yet.

By Gale Editorial · Updated 2026-09-22. How we write.

Before anything else

Nothing you draft or sign in Gale reaches a pharmacy today: Gale is not connected to the pharmacy network yet. A script you draft and sign exists only in this chart. Record it in Gale so the chart and the note are right, then send it by the route your practice already uses.

What prescribing does not do yet is the full list, and it is the page to read before you rely on any of this.

Where prescribing lives

Prescribing hangs off the chart. Open a patient from Caseload and select prescribing under Medications; that link carries the patient id across. Arriving any other way, the prescribing screen asks for an id and waits.

The screen reads top to bottom in the order the work happens: what the scribe pulled out of the visit and is waiting on a decision, the composer where you write the script, then the prescriptions already on this chart. EPCS access sits beside the patient field. It is where controlled-substance permission is set up, and it is not a prescribing screen.

What you fill in

Every field is one you filled. Nothing is defaulted, completed or guessed.

Drug and directions. The directions stay free text end to end. A field that rewrites what you typed is a field that can change what a direction means between your screen and a counter.
Dispense. Quantity, days supply, refills, DAW, and the DEA schedule when the drug is controlled. Leave the schedule at Not controlled and nothing treats the script as controlled.
Effective date, when the script should not be filled before a date.
Pharmacy. Type an NCPDP id, or select Show mine to list the pharmacies your practice already holds. Gale builds no pharmacy directory, so it offers no plausible guess either.

Select Check references to read the dose and allergy references beside the composer. They flag and they never block: dose flags and allergy checks says what each one reads.

Draft, then sign

Draft prescription writes the record. It signs nothing and sends nothing, and the control says so beside itself.

Signing is a handoff. Select get a signing session on the prescription row; Gale opens a session and hands you to the prescribing service's own screens. Entry, the Ready-to-Sign step, the DEA statement, the PIN and the second factor are all rendered there. That ceremony is certified by the prescribing service, and a copy of it inside Gale would be a copy of a legal instrument — so there is nothing here that looks like signing.

Gale records that a session was minted. It never records a session as a signature.

When it refuses you

A refusal arrives in the server's own words, and several cite the rule they rest on — a refill on a Schedule II comes back citing the regulation that forbids it. Gale does not reword a refusal and does not repair one. Read the sentence; it names what to change.

Four things are checked before a signing session exists, and each fails on its own:

Checked	What to do about it
Your account is marked as a prescriber	A record only a practice administrator writes. Ask for it.
The pharmacy connection for your practice	Off everywhere today. Nothing you do on this screen opens it.
A live EPCS grant, for a controlled script	Two other people set it up — see EPCS access.
Your licence in the patient's state	Read at the moment the session is opened, against where the patient is.

A refusal is recorded either way, on an append-only trail.

What the chart keeps

Each prescription holds the drug, the directions, quantity, days supply, refills, DAW, the pharmacy, the DEA schedule and its own identifier, with a log of every action taken on it.

If the scribe proposed the medication first, that provenance travels onto the prescription — and it decays the moment you edit the text, because an order you rewrote is an order you authored.

Common questions

Open the patient's chart, select prescribing under Medications, fill the composer and select Draft prescription. Then select get a signing session on that row, which hands you to the prescribing service to sign. Today that is as far as it goes: nothing reaches a pharmacy, so record the script in Gale and send it by the route your practice already uses.

No. Drafting writes a record on the chart. It signs nothing and transmits nothing, and no later step transmits either while Gale is not connected to the pharmacy network.

Because the signing ceremony belongs to the prescribing service and is certified as theirs. Gale opens a session and hands you across. Rebuilding entry, the Ready-to-Sign step, the DEA statement and the second factor inside Gale would pull that certification onto Gale permanently, and re-trigger it on every change.

Your licence is read against the patient's state at the moment the signing session is opened. A licence for the wrong state is refused there, and the refusal says which state it wanted.

Read the refusal sentence, which names the rule. The most common cause is an account not yet marked as a prescriber — a record only a practice administrator writes, so no amount of retrying will change it.

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