I somehow missed that announcement that faxing scripts will disappear at the end of the year. Where is this published? This will be a major nightmare. On the plus side I'll get paid for doing refills since there is no way I will have my staff be tied up on the phone doing refills.
I've been eprescribing for 3 years now yet mainly use it only for refills. On eRxNow (Allscripts) you can not eprescribe to the mail order pharmacies (medco, caremark, etc) so you either fax or give them to the patient. Likewise you must fax or have a patient pick up controlled meds. Finally, not every pharmacy is hooked up into the network, and even if they are, once they send out a refill request they have no way of verifying that the request went through to the physician. I've had a lot of patients calling my office this past week asking why I didn't refill their medicine. I've had my staff inform them that no request came through on Allscripts. I do Allscripts almost every day including weekends so I have no backlog on my end, yet I find that on Saturday and Sunday there may only be 4-5 refills and then on Monday morning all of a sudden I have 18-25. Go figure. I've noticed there is a delay from when the patient calls the pharmacy to when I receive it of about 2-3 days at least. We tell patients we take 72 hours to turn around a refill request and that they are responsible to call the pharmacy a week before they will run out of medicine. Naturally some don't understand and blame us for them running out of medicine. Boy isn't medicine fun! (And I still enjoy what I do!)
