Hey gang,
Our policies are for our DOCTOR's sanity, not the patients. If a patient calls on a weekend or after hours, they're told to CALL ME BACK with their request when they have the pharmacy phone number in front of them. So sorry, NO, I'M NOT GOING TO LOOK IT UP. I'm on call, but not on duty. They're YOUR meds, YOU do the legwork. I also point out to them that they open that bottle at least once a day - the time to call is Monday through Friday during business hours, BEFORE the bottle is empty. I yell at them. I'm not above this. Sorry, acting professional does not necessarily mean rewarding laziness or stupidity on the patient's part. They've known now for a week they're almost out, but waited until Saturday at 8:00 AM - so as to "catch me early before I'm busy", never mind that I'm sleeping, to call for their refill.
You're out of refills? Means you're due for a follow up. I'm VERY liberal with refills - if you're on something that you're going to be on forever, you either get a month with 11 refills, or a quarter with 3 refills. When your year is up, is time to come in.
Things that can't be written that way, you come in and pick up the computer printed script. Again, don't like it? go elsewhere. My girls are NOT here to spend the day on the phone or fax for you, not for the $40 your insurance company paid me for half an hour of my time for your office visit. The exception is if you're 90 years old and shut in.. those we fax.
Out of pain pills? You're S.O.L., baby. NO phoned in "emergency" narcotic refills. None. Never. Yeah, I'm mean. Don't like it? Go somewhere else where they'll put up with your b*lls*it. Oh, it's an EARLY NARCOTIC REFILL on a weekend??? You're risking being dismissed from the practice for violating our narcotic policy for taking controlled substances other than as directed. We enforce this. We also drug test.
I find that most of the time when we say NO to unreasonable requests, the patients say "OK", and they start holding up their end of the bargain. We've only had ONE patient leave because we wouldn't phone in their kid's Rx. The father lives less than a mile from the office, and always sent the kids in with their grandmother because he was too lazy to bring in his own kids. We were sorry to see the kids go - they were nice kids - but the dad was a pain in the behind, and wasn't missed.
<sigh>
Putting that aside, having the patient's preferred pharmacy on the Rx screen should be a relatively easy hack, as the patient record set is already in memory, and I believe that the patient's pharmacy is part of the demographics record. Having a fax server as a printer, with the pharmacies listed so you can just pick off the one on the screen would be cool.
I've cut my patch-writing down to almost zero, as I've been too busy with running the practice and projects at home to do much, but I'll look at this, or if Jon reads the board, maybe he'll consider having one of his programmers add this.
Regards,
V.
