Exchanging Prescription Information Electronically with Pharmacies
Support Protocol
If you experience challenges that aff ect your practice’s ability to exchange prescription information with pharmacies, two possible issues could be contributing. Please refer to the following to help report and resolve them:
Issue:
A patient or pharmacy calls to report not receiving a prescription that your practice sent using your
electronic prescribing application. electronic prescribing application.
Possible Causes:
- A technical issue with your electronic prescribing system, the pharmacy’s system, or the network connectivity may have returned an error on the prescription’s transmission.
- The prescription may have been sent to the pharmacy’s fax instead of its computer. Reasons can include the medication being a controlled substance, a temporary loss of connectivity, or the fact that the pharmacy is not yet set-up to receive prescriptions electronically, only by fax.
- The prescription may have been successfully received but “on hold” due to an out-of-stock medication, a prior authorization issue, interruption during dispensing, or another issue. A simple miscommunication between pharmacy staff members and the patient or your offi ce may have led to its being reported as “not received.”
- If the pharmacy is inexperienced with e-prescribing, the staff member may not have adequately checked the pharmacy system for the successfully delivered prescription.
What to Do:
- To ensure that the patient’s needs are taken care of, provide the pharmacy with a verbal order for the prescription so it can be dispensed immediately.
- Review your prescribing system for any errors that may indicate the prescription was not successfully delivered and to confi rm that it was addressed to the correct pharmacy.
- If the prescription was successfully delivered ask the pharmacy staff to ensure that in the future they review their computer system, fax, and all points within their workfl ow before calling for a verbal order.
- Call your electronic prescribing system provider to report the incident and open a support case in order to reduce the chance of a future occurrence.
Issue::
A pharmacy sends requests for prescription refi lls to your practice by fax even though you know it is capable
of sending the requests electronically. of sending the requests electronically.
Possible Causes:
- The pharmacy may have more than one record on fi le for you in its computer system and not all of these records have been updated to refl ect your e-prescribing capability.
- A patient requests a renewal of a prescription through a pharmacy’s automated phone line. The phone line may only be able to deliver requests to practices by fax.
- The request is for a controlled medication, which can only be responded to by fax or phone.
- The pharmacy has not received a response to its original electronic refi ll request within 24 hours and has faxed to try and get a response.
What to Do:
- Respond to the faxed refi ll request to ensure that your patient’s request is taken care of.
- If you feel that the issue occurs frequently enough to be a problem, report the issue to your technology vendor,
with the name, location and phone number of the pharmacy or via the Web at www.surescripts.com/refi llsupport llsupport.
Please note:
It’s important that you let your technology vendor know about any issue that may make it diffi cult to
exchange prescription information with pharmacies to reduce the chance of a reoccurrence.
For additional resources, visit www.rxsuccess.com.
