Food for Thought

Ah, yes. My favorite of all callers. Especially when they call during a rush and I’m trying to count and answer the phone at the same time so that the people that are THERE can get their prescriptions in a timely fashion.

“Ineedarefillthenumberis….”

At least take a breath so I can grab a paper and pen!

How about the offices that respond to your refill fax with a phone call that authorizes 3 refills? Then a fax three hours later for 5 refills. Then another fax the next morning for 11 refills.

Oh yes, it happens to me all the time, customers asking for a pharmacist and then giving a refill number. I think I will have to have a blog entry just on refills alone..

Even better are the idiots who ask to speak to me who only want a price on their prescription. Why, why, why. And most of the time I have to go through the “we won’t know your insurance price till you bring us the rx and we run it through” crap.

Angriest, I agree with you. Luckily, we do about 99% refill fax request. Only a handful of docs “insist” on callng for refills. Sometimes we “forget” to call on those. (We AVERAGE about 500 rxs/day….7 day ave). Regarding the morons who insist on calling in rf to RPh, I do same as you, try to transfer to automated system. Or I enter it, see if maint. med, check for good compliance, and just set up on autorefill. (I don’t tell ‘em, I just do it). They’re quite shocked the next month the want to talk to RPh about getting a refill and I tell ‘em it’s ready.

My simple solution to this problem is usually to politely tell the patient that my technician would be more than happy to take their order from them, put them on hold, and have the tech pick up. You sometimes have to “train” your patients, and although it would be more efficient for me to just take the call, in the long run I think it is a valuable pharmacist-time saving measure!

ooooor you get the “i was using your autorefill system and it wouldn’t take my number and transferred me to you”. i figure whatever went wrong and ask them for the refill number. what’s the patient’s response? “beep bop boooop bip beep beep boop”. TELL ME THE FUCKING NUMBER I’M A HUMAN NOT A COMPUTER!!! I DON’T UNDERSTAND THE NUMERICAL EQUIVALENT OF “BOOP”.