Giving doctors visibility into their road to compliance for medical cannabis.
Integrating MDT reviews into the prescribing flow.
The problem
As Script Assist evolved from a simple prescribing platform into a full telehealth service, we hit a critical compliance requirement: MDT reviews. These are peer-to-peer healthcare reviews where groups of doctors discuss specific patients and their symptoms. They are essentially a safeguarding checkpoint to ensure only legitimate patients receive cannabis prescriptions.
The regulations were complex. Whether an MDT review was needed depended on the strength of THC in a product, whether the patient had been prescribed something similar before, amongst other clinical factors. Doctors were attempting organising these reviews manually (with the help of our team) finding other cannabis prescribers, coordinating schedules, and managing the whole process outside our platform. It was time-consuming for all parties, frustrating, and a barrier to prescribing.
We needed to build this into the prescribing flow itself, making it feel like a natural part of the process rather than an administrative burden.
Team
- Engineering2
- Design1
Designing the prescribing flow
The challenge was weaving together familiarity and complexity. Doctors were used to a standard prescription flow: review patient, select medicine, confirm and send. But now we had to add conditional logic: some prescriptions would need an MDT review, others wouldn't. The system needed to know the difference, and we needed to work out how to make it make sense.
I started by mapping out all the dependencies:
THC strength thresholds
Patient prescription history
Product categories
Regulatory requirements
Making it feel like part of prescribing
Then I designed a flow that felt familiar but intelligently adapted based on these conditions. When a doctor selected a product that triggered an MDT requirement, the system would prompt them inline: “This prescription requires peer review”, guiding them to coordinate it within the platform rather than having to organise it externally.
The key insight was making MDT reviews feel like part of prescribing, not a roadblock to it. Rather than making doctors discover they needed a review after the fact and scramble to organise it separately with a chain of dependents, we surfaced it at the right moment in the flow. The system would help facilitate finding available reviewers, scheduling the meeting, and tracking when the review was complete.
Response
User testing revealed that doctors appreciated having the coordination handled within the platform. Before, organising an MDT review meant stopping mid-prescription to email colleagues (or delegate the task, breaking the link), check calendars, and coordinate outside the system. Now they could request and schedule the review without leaving the prescribing flow.
Business value and success
By integrating MDT review coordination directly into the prescribing flow, we removed one of the biggest friction points for doctors considering Script Assist. Consultants specifically cited this feature as a reason they switched from their existing systems, as it avoided them needed to build up a network of potential doctors to take part in their reviews. Script Assist became the network. Doctors just needed to tell us when they were available.
Faster prescribing workflows: doctors could identify and schedule reviews within the same session, dramatically reducing back and forth.
Higher compliance confidence: the system ensured they knew when reviews were required, reducing risk of missed requirements.
Better user satisfaction: doctors felt supported rather than burdened by compliance steps.
Post-launch
Post-launch, we continued iterating based on feedback. Doctors requested the ability to see MDT review history for patients, to track which prescriptions had been peer-reviewed in the past. This became the next evolution of the feature, building a complete audit trail that gave doctors even more confidence in their prescribing decisions.
We also built an option into the prescribe flow to allow them to write their prescription within the MDT review itself after discovering this as a common want amongst clinicians, especially newer ones or for more complicated cases.
All of this information and functionality being built within Script Assist contributed to it growing into a strong tele-health platform that not only digitised paperwork legacy systems, but genuinely solved the problems of healthcare workflows (for cannabis, anyway!).