Tweet
Some pharmacists have their own blogs, therein to rant about what they have to deal with on a daily basis. Me . . . I have CS.com. This may wind up becoming a series.
Tonight's episode, for your enlightenment and my stress-relief, deals with the following customer. Not an SC as such, but rather just clueless.
I didn't deal with him directly, as he didn't speak English and while I comprehend his language well enough, am by no means fluent in it. Fortunately A, my tech, is the same ethnicity (well, 99+% of this village is the same ethnicity) so he was able to communicate. The dialogue represented below is actually translated from A's conversations with this guy.
Starts out with this customer, call him D, wants a refill for his son K. I check in the computer; K has never been to this store before, so what refill is he talking about? My tech (A) finally gets D to tell him that he has a prescription in his hand for the medication in question. What we usually do in this situation is send our delivery driver to pick up the script, fill it and send the driver back out with the finished product; occasionally, though, we'll take the prescription by fax. Now if it's the doctor faxing it in, that fax becomes the original prescription and gets filed as such, but if the patient is sending the fax, we need to collect the hard copy from him and file that.
So he says he'll fax it in. We wait a while. Nothing comes in.
D calls back. Did we get his fax?
No, we didn't get anything. Fax machine never even rang.
OK, maybe it didn't go through. He'll send it again.
Fax machine rings, receives, hangs up, spits out a paper. I pull it out and discover . . . he'd faxed us the back of the prescription. That's not very helpful.
D calls back. Did we get his fax?
Well we got it, but it was the wrong side. Send it again.
Fax machine rings, receives, hangs up, spits out a paper. I pull it out and discover . . . he'd faxed us the correct side this time, but only the top 1/3 of the prescription came through before it cut off. Got the doctor's name and info, the patient's name, and then blank. That's not very helpful either.
D calls back. Did we get his fax?
Well we got the top half of it. Send it again.
(At this point, D was asking how come we couldn't get his fax correctly. He has a really good fax machine! To which my response was, sure, you can buy a really great car too, but if you don't learn how to drive it you'll still crash it into the wall first time you get behind the wheel.)
Fax machine rings, receives, hangs up, spits out a paper. This time it's the whole prescription. It's actually legible for a change, and mirabile dictu, he's even put his son's insurance information and date of birth on there. I get ready to start filling it. Enter K in the computer, his insurance, etc. Then I go ahead and fill the thing, and notice that the date on this prescription is 12/22/2012. This triggers a bunch of muttering from me along the lines of how come this guy's in such a hurry all of a sudden when he's had this Rx in his possession for over two months. But there's a worse problem.
See, this kid has dual coverage. Primary is a commercial plan, and for secondary he has NY State Medicaid to pick up the copay. This prescription is for Synthroid®, which has had a generic since forever, but the doctor has specified that he wants the brand name only. That's fine, but the commercial plans will generally not pay for the brand name drug if there's a generic, so he winds up with a copay of $33 and change. Medicaid usually picks that up, but not in this case . . . because for a script to be valid on Medicaid, you have to fill it within 30 days of the date written, and this is well over 2 months.
So A calls D back, and tries to explain this. His choices are either to pay the $33, or to get a new prescription in the morning. He finally gets this idea across to them, and they hang up.
Then D calls us back. There are refills on that prescription, why can't he just get one of them? We can't figure out what he's talking about, so we start asking more questions . . . and finally the story comes out. Seems he'd already faxed that same prescription to the other pharmacy in the village, back in December, but for whatever reason they never collected the hard copy from him. Now he's trying to bring it to us to fill it again. Not out of any attempt to commit fraud, although that's what the result would be: he genuinely does not understand why what he's trying to do isn't doable.
We finally get him to comprehend that Other Pharmacy has the refills on their end, and that he should call them, not us.
All this took up most of the evening to play out (I was on 5-9 tonight). End result of all that horsing around: nothing. No prescription filled, ergo no profit to the store. I could have been doing something useful like compounding nystatin, zinc oxide and Maalox (the locals swear by this obscene mixture as the best thing for their kids' diaper rashes), or reading cs.com or something. At least it wasn't me on the phone for all that time...
And something else occurred to me, after we were all done. There are plenty of pharmacists who would have not noticed (or simply ignored) the date on the prescription. If you don't specifically enter the date in the system, it defaults to today's date, and would have gone through just fine . . . for a while, until they found out. At which point, they do an audit, and recoup the funds they've paid out for that script, and who knows how many others.
And they will find out. New York State prescriptions have serial numbers, and NY Medicaid tracks them. We've already had situations where someone typo'd a number on entering it, and the next day we get a phone call from the state, telling us that the number we entered had been used already...
Tonight's episode, for your enlightenment and my stress-relief, deals with the following customer. Not an SC as such, but rather just clueless.
I didn't deal with him directly, as he didn't speak English and while I comprehend his language well enough, am by no means fluent in it. Fortunately A, my tech, is the same ethnicity (well, 99+% of this village is the same ethnicity) so he was able to communicate. The dialogue represented below is actually translated from A's conversations with this guy.
Starts out with this customer, call him D, wants a refill for his son K. I check in the computer; K has never been to this store before, so what refill is he talking about? My tech (A) finally gets D to tell him that he has a prescription in his hand for the medication in question. What we usually do in this situation is send our delivery driver to pick up the script, fill it and send the driver back out with the finished product; occasionally, though, we'll take the prescription by fax. Now if it's the doctor faxing it in, that fax becomes the original prescription and gets filed as such, but if the patient is sending the fax, we need to collect the hard copy from him and file that.
So he says he'll fax it in. We wait a while. Nothing comes in.
D calls back. Did we get his fax?
No, we didn't get anything. Fax machine never even rang.
OK, maybe it didn't go through. He'll send it again.
Fax machine rings, receives, hangs up, spits out a paper. I pull it out and discover . . . he'd faxed us the back of the prescription. That's not very helpful.
D calls back. Did we get his fax?
Well we got it, but it was the wrong side. Send it again.
Fax machine rings, receives, hangs up, spits out a paper. I pull it out and discover . . . he'd faxed us the correct side this time, but only the top 1/3 of the prescription came through before it cut off. Got the doctor's name and info, the patient's name, and then blank. That's not very helpful either.
D calls back. Did we get his fax?
Well we got the top half of it. Send it again.
(At this point, D was asking how come we couldn't get his fax correctly. He has a really good fax machine! To which my response was, sure, you can buy a really great car too, but if you don't learn how to drive it you'll still crash it into the wall first time you get behind the wheel.)
Fax machine rings, receives, hangs up, spits out a paper. This time it's the whole prescription. It's actually legible for a change, and mirabile dictu, he's even put his son's insurance information and date of birth on there. I get ready to start filling it. Enter K in the computer, his insurance, etc. Then I go ahead and fill the thing, and notice that the date on this prescription is 12/22/2012. This triggers a bunch of muttering from me along the lines of how come this guy's in such a hurry all of a sudden when he's had this Rx in his possession for over two months. But there's a worse problem.
See, this kid has dual coverage. Primary is a commercial plan, and for secondary he has NY State Medicaid to pick up the copay. This prescription is for Synthroid®, which has had a generic since forever, but the doctor has specified that he wants the brand name only. That's fine, but the commercial plans will generally not pay for the brand name drug if there's a generic, so he winds up with a copay of $33 and change. Medicaid usually picks that up, but not in this case . . . because for a script to be valid on Medicaid, you have to fill it within 30 days of the date written, and this is well over 2 months.
So A calls D back, and tries to explain this. His choices are either to pay the $33, or to get a new prescription in the morning. He finally gets this idea across to them, and they hang up.
Then D calls us back. There are refills on that prescription, why can't he just get one of them? We can't figure out what he's talking about, so we start asking more questions . . . and finally the story comes out. Seems he'd already faxed that same prescription to the other pharmacy in the village, back in December, but for whatever reason they never collected the hard copy from him. Now he's trying to bring it to us to fill it again. Not out of any attempt to commit fraud, although that's what the result would be: he genuinely does not understand why what he's trying to do isn't doable.
We finally get him to comprehend that Other Pharmacy has the refills on their end, and that he should call them, not us.
All this took up most of the evening to play out (I was on 5-9 tonight). End result of all that horsing around: nothing. No prescription filled, ergo no profit to the store. I could have been doing something useful like compounding nystatin, zinc oxide and Maalox (the locals swear by this obscene mixture as the best thing for their kids' diaper rashes), or reading cs.com or something. At least it wasn't me on the phone for all that time...
And something else occurred to me, after we were all done. There are plenty of pharmacists who would have not noticed (or simply ignored) the date on the prescription. If you don't specifically enter the date in the system, it defaults to today's date, and would have gone through just fine . . . for a while, until they found out. At which point, they do an audit, and recoup the funds they've paid out for that script, and who knows how many others.
And they will find out. New York State prescriptions have serial numbers, and NY Medicaid tracks them. We've already had situations where someone typo'd a number on entering it, and the next day we get a phone call from the state, telling us that the number we entered had been used already...
Comment