Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Those @&%$ auto fax refill requests...arrggg - one mans rant

Last week for whatever reason a big chain department store pharmacy (that a lot of patients use) decided to launch a fax bombardment my way. These were followed up by e-renewal requests as well. All of these regarding one patient with the same renewal request over and over. Unfortunately it ended up totaling about 11 messages in 8 days. I had responded to the first auto refill request with a denial. It's happened before with other patients but not so much.

Next thing you know (2 minutes later) I get another fax with the same refill request. Well I had just finished my cup of coffee and I wasn't going to take it any more! I proceeded to print on the fax in 120 font, "please see first response" and also attached a copy of their first request that I had written on and sent it back (Updox made this easy). Over the next few days, every time I got the same refill request, I would attach all previous faxes. I kept writing in large font different things like "please see attached response #1 and #2 " etc. I also included a page Updox adds which gives you the time and date you sent the fax.

This went on a few times and I started laughing imagining the pharmacist saying "what the #%$&^ is going on with this guy?". After the 4th fax, I called and spoke to the head pharmacist. Of course she knew what I was calling about and apologized "won't happen again"...right. Advised her if her machines continued to waste our staff time, we would advise our patients to go elsewhere.

Still the faxes & messages continued the come in. At the end of the last day I printed all 11 refill requests with everything I had responded with. I drove down to the store (I shop there too) and asked to speak to the head pharmacist. She came out and slowly I started counting out loud with every page I set down on the counter, "one, two, three....". After the first page I set down, she knew who I was and she started apologizing again, but I kept going. When I got to the last piece of paper, I said "I'm waving the white flag, what do you want me to do? This is getting ridiculous".

I kindly told her I didn't want any more fax refill requests coming to our office. She said she'd see to it and would be contacting corporate to find out what's going on. I was very nice about it and wasn't being mean and we both laughed. I told her it wasn't her fault but that something had to be fixed and I felt I needed to get my point across.

The next morning no faxes, I was surprised. Then about noon came the next one. In the biggest font that would fit on the page, I wrote "REALLY????". That was all I wrote and faxed it back. It's been a few days now and haven't received any faxes from them. (Wonder how long this will last?)

The store is Walmart or Sam's, correct? Happens to us also (fortunately rarely). The repeated faxes don't come from the local store, some corporate level pin-head is responsible...the local stores don't know how to stop the spam storm either. Just another unintended consequence of eRx. Makes you wish that the Anonymous hackers would target them.

and to make matters worse (for me who likes a clean, easily read chart), these repeated denials of ERx requests creates by default an ugly mess when you look at the "Past Encounter" tab. I wish we could turn that particular recording feature off.