Spoke to my pharmacist and this is her explanation:
My erx's marked "DAW" come across as "DAW". In order to enter the medication into her system, she has to put a number after the DAW.
DAW-1 means it is the doctor's choice.
DAW-2 means it is at the patient's request.
If I send nothing but "DAW" she believes that to mean it is at my request, so she codes it DAW-1.
Perhaps there is some variation based on the pharmacy's receiving system (i.e. maybe some automatically convert a plain DAW to DAW-1 since it can be assumed that the doctor is making the request).
This is useful information (the difference between DAW-1 and -2) but I don't think it changes the way I will send my DAW scripts.
