The Pharmaceutical Care Management Association (PCMA)
Put out the above ad… making accusations that the community pharmacies are seemingly willingly participants in legal drugs getting to the streets. I won’t get into all the medications these “mail order firms” put out in the hot/cold all those prescription medications that are exposed to extremes outside of their normal temperature storage requirements…nor will I address all the “auto refills” that are sent out, regardless if the patient is compliant or continuing to take the medications.
Yes.. the community pharmacy is part of the drug diversion problem… mostly because of the way our system is set up. In most states, that have PMP’s the transmission of the data on controlled substances is done in background and transparently to the Pharmacist/tech at the keyboard. It is mandatory that the system submit this data. Yet – in most states – the Pharmacist or Pharmacy has to register separately for the permission to retrieve information from the same database that they are required to submit to… and registering to get reports from the PMP is OPTIONAL.
What would happen if when a Pharmacist/tech entered the driver’s license & SSN from a new patient… the pharmacy system verified the name, DOB against the state’s driver’s license database and the social security database.. notifying the user if the numbers/name/dob are valid and if valid … display back a picture as it appeared on the driver’s license when it was issued. If the health insurance industry could compile a database by SSN that would indicated that a person did or did not have drug insurance that the pharmacy computer system could query.
Under such a system… by the time that the Pharmacist/tech was ready to type in the Rx order into the system… the pharmacy staff would know if the driver’s license belongs to the person who presented the ID and the Rx and if the person had prescription insurance coverage.
At this point in time… the decision has to be made … if the driver’s license number or SSN comes back as invalid/fake or a non-match… do you really want to fill the Rx?
If all the data points are validate… you have just prevented corrupt data from being sent to the PMP – fake name/fake driver’s license/SSN
Instead of having a separate login for the state’s PMP… the computer’s MAC address is registered with the PMP and a simple menu choice or function key would sent a request to the PMP to retrieve a report and email to the store or display it on the computer’s screen… that could be printed out.
Imagine if the PMP did a routine analysis of the data submitted and when the pharmacy submitted data to the PMP.. and the PMP had flagged this particular person as a “person of interest” and sends back a prompt … ” person of interest .. you would wish a report ? Y/N ”
The system/databases are in place… that would allow community pharmacies to put a dent into the diversion to the streets… only if the bureaucrats would allow it to happen.
Why do we have all of these databases… if they are all isolated and the time it takes is an unrealistic amount of time to pull data from each… if we can even have access to them.
YEP… drug diversion starts at the community pharmacy level… but try to build anything with just a pair of pliers and a screw driver… we are missing a lot of tools …to make a difference.
To borrow a phrase from the 70’s show SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN “Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic man”… we have the capability to interface all the various databases to give us the tools to do our job of screening for legit patients/Rxs much better.
Filed under: General dumb-ass problems
EFORCSE is still not available. The DEA are literally “the bad guys” and “out to get CVS”. A whole lot of patients are about to go through withdrawal. Narcotic prescriptions are being removed from the metrics to allow for the decrease in volume.