Refill Requests: The Workflow Nobody Optimizes

The Refill Request Nobody Talks About

Refill requests are the papercuts of DPC. No single refill is hard. But the workflow around them is quietly brutal. A patient messages you on Spruce asking for a lisinopril refill. You open your EHR to check when they were last seen and whether their blood pressure has been controlled. You open your Rx tool to send the prescription. Then you go back to Spruce to let the patient know it's done. Then you document the refill in the EHR. Four systems. One refill.

Now multiply that by the 8–12 refill requests that land in your inbox on a typical Monday morning. Each one touches at least three systems, each system lives in a different tab, and each tab switch pulls your attention away from the clinical question that actually matters: should this medication be refilled?

Nobody optimizes this workflow because it feels too small to bother with. But small and frequent is exactly the kind of workflow that bleeds time when it's broken.

Why Refills Are Uniquely Painful

Most clinical workflows have a clear home base — the EHR for charting, the lab portal for results. Refill requests don't have a home. They start in your messaging app, require verification in your EHR, get executed in your Rx platform, and need documentation back in the EHR. The workflow bounces across systems by design.

That means you can't just "get better at refills." The inefficiency is structural. It doesn't matter how fast you type or how well you know your tools — if the tools live in separate tabs, you're going to spend more time navigating between them than actually making clinical decisions. For a task that takes 60 seconds of actual thinking, you're spending 2–3 minutes on logistics. And because refills feel routine, most docs don't even notice the lost time. It just becomes background noise in an already-full day.

The other problem is interruptions. You're halfway through refill number four when a patient walks in, or a staff member has a question. When you come back, you can't remember — did you already send that atorvastatin refill, or just check the chart? When your workflow spans four tabs, there's no visual anchor to tell you where you left off.

One Screen. One Refill Flow.

Tabflows puts your messaging app, EHR, and Rx tool on a single screen so the entire refill workflow happens without a single tab switch. Patient message on the left, chart in the center, prescription tool on the right. You read the request, verify the clinical context, send the Rx, and reply to the patient — all from one workspace.

The layout gives you something tab-switching never can: a visual workflow. You move left to right — message, chart, prescribe, reply — and you always know where you are in the process. If you get interrupted, you come back to the same screen and pick up exactly where you left off. No guessing, no re-checking, no duplicate prescriptions.

Before and After

Before: Monday morning. Twelve refill requests in Spruce. You open each message, then open the EHR in another tab to check the patient's med list and last visit date, then open your Rx tool in a third tab to send the refill. Back to Spruce to reply. Back to the EHR to document. Repeat twelve times. You look up and 40 minutes have evaporated.

After: You open your Tabflows refill workspace. Spruce messages on the left, EHR in the center, your Rx tool on the right. First request: lisinopril refill. You glance at the chart — last visit three weeks ago, BP controlled. Send the refill right there. Reply in Spruce. Next message. The same twelve refills take 15 minutes because you never leave the screen.

The Safety Angle

Here's something that doesn't get discussed enough: tab-switching during refills isn't just slow — it's a safety risk. When you're toggling between three systems and twelve patients, the chance of sending the wrong dose, missing a contraindication, or refilling a medication that should have been discontinued goes up. Having the chart visible while you prescribe isn't a luxury — it's a safeguard. Tabflows makes the safe workflow the default workflow.

Stop Tab-Switching. Start Prescribing.

Refill requests will never be exciting. But they don't have to be a 40-minute tab-switching marathon either. Tabflows collapses the multi-system refill workflow into a single screen — faster, safer, and less draining. Try Tabflows free and see how refills should actually work.