This is announcement regarding pharmacy etiquette and its relation to all those who work at a doctor's office:
I will be plain as day when I state this. To all of you who work at a doctor's office, if you continue to tell patients that when you send a prescription, it instantaneously is sent to the pharmacy and the prescription will be ready when they get there, I will personally visit you with a 60 dram vial full of Klor-Con and beat you over the head.
I realize the majority of you are probably a bit unaware of how the transfer of prescriptions work between offices, so lets give a brief overview. If you fax something, it ends up in a queue with all of the other faxes in the office because there are only so many lines dedicated to faxing. If you send an eRx it is quicker, but is still not 'instantaneous'.
Even taking this into account, to suggest that the world will stop when this patient's prescription arrives in our store and we will work double time solely on that prescription to get it ready for said patient is utterly ludicrous.
This latter part should be common sense. You know how busy you get, so you should be able to derive how busy we are. If not, take a jaunt down to your local pharmacy in the middle of the day and observe. It may prove to be an eye opening experience for you.
Technology has greatly sped up various processes in our lives, but nothing is 'instantaneous'. If you continue to make such factious guarantees to your patients, we will respond by doing the same to you.
So when that patient comes in asking their Lortabs, we can just as easily tell them that it's been sitting on your desk from the moment we hit our little fax button and they can check with you to see if its ready. And that when you call, you'll be the one to answer the phone because you're eagerly awaiting their phone call.
Now wouldn't that be fun?
5 comments:
I know better, and don't tell them that. I swear.
I feel your pain. I see patients all the time that think their e-script was done the second the doctor hit the send button. It doesn't work that way everyone!
Amen! Tires are faster than electrons around here, and no one ever understands.
Yep, I think we should tell all patients, "the doctor's office will respond to our refill request within 10 minutes. If not, you should be very upset and call them directly."
Once the doctor pulls this, or tells the patient how much the drug is, I take off my nice "patient voice" and let them know their next appointment with the physician is free. If they say its not tell them the pharmacy said it was. I wonder how they like it.
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