Dear Valued Clients of Collaborative Medicine:
I would like to educate everyone on how our prescriptions work, and to reset some ground rules to make things go smoother. As with most medical practices these days, nearly everyone is using some sort of an electronic medical records (EMR) system. Within these EMR programs are built in categories of nationwide pharmacies and medications. When we prescribe a new prescription for you, we will need a few things like, the pharmacy name, the street address and city. This is how we select the pharmacy. Knowing the pharmacy phone number is useful, but not necessary, as we are not calling in prescriptions by phone these days, unless it is a schedule 3 or 4 drug like testosterone or something like a sleeping medicine.
Likewise, when we are doing a prescription refill, we are just submitting an electronic fax to the selected pharmacy, and are not calling in refills — as this is simply too time consuming.
Here is what would help us facilitate this process, since we do not have a nursing staff to do this for you. Your medical practitioners, myself included, are doing the refills.
If everyone can adhere to the following “ground rules’, it will make it easier to expedite your prescription needs. Remember, please do not call our staff for refills. Just ask the pharmacy to send a refill request over to our office, with at least 1 week’s notice.
Yours truly,
Ron Manzanero, M.D.
A). For refills, please contact your pharmacy and tell them you are about to run out of your medicine and for them to fax our office at: 512-501-2261. (Most of the pharmacies have our new fax number.)
– A faxed copy is easier and faster for us to process.
– Additionally, having a faxed in refill request allows us to review the information to make sure that the medicine, strength, dosing schedule and quantity are correct, based on the review of your chart that takes place with each request. Sometimes we need an updated set of labs to allow for a refill.
-Per Texas law, if I haven’t seen you within 1 year, I cannot continue to prescribe a medication. Please schedule a follow up with Christy if this is the case.
– Please do not call/text Christy or Claire for prescription refills.
B) It is best policy to give us at least a one week notice before you run out. Too often we are getting refill requests that are urgent and going to run out in 1 or 2 days. With our busy schedules, we cannot always get to every refill immediately.
C) Please do not request medicine refills for a weekend pick up, nor send us a refill request late Friday afternoon.
D) If you are behind on your yearly visit and labs, (which we are legally obligated to insure), we may only refill a 30 day supply until you can get on our schedule. If there have been repeated failures to schedule/attend an appointment, then we will not be able to refill your prescription, as per the legal standard of care.
E) If you have insurance coverage for a 90 day quantity (for example: Express Script or OptumRX), please let us know immediately. We typically prescribe for 30 days with refills, and we have to repeat our work to change the prescription.
F) Old fax numbers: I have noticed that many of my patients will have the pharmacy send a fax refill request and then they get no response. Most likely the fax number is the one that is associated with my previous practice, back when I was co-owner of Modern Medicine/Modern Thyroid clinic. Please verify that the pharmacy has our current fax number (512-501-2261).
G) Please do not send any emails to the old gmail address that I used to have. Some people have left refill requests that way, and it will only cause another delay.
Thank you again for your understanding!