Do Doctors actually read?
We all know that most doctors have a problem with their penmanship. Illegible prescriptions are commonplace. Then they wonder why we “waste their time” by calling to clarify. One example is at the top of my mind when I am writing this. A doctor at a local medicenter type office that is notoriously busy scribbled out a prescription for a blood pressure medication for a patient. The writing was so bad that we (all 4 of us working that day) couldn’t make out whether it was 10mg or 20mg. The first digit was a squiggly line that could have been either, and since the patient was new to our pharmacy, we couldn’t even hazard a guess by comparing the written RX to what was on file. Phoning the office is a lost cause. They put you on hold for at least 15 minutes before they will even ask who is calling. “Blahblah’s clinic, hold!” click. Generally writing up a fax cover and sending it off will get a response….. in a week.
Anyways, after faxing a copy of the written rx repeatedly and phoning on a daily basis to ask if Dr Scrawl has had a chance to look at our request, we get a phone call. It’s Dr Scrawl himself and the conversation is along these lines:
Dr: So… tell me what you can’t read on this rx?
Pharm:We couldn’t decipher whether this was supposed to be 10mg or 20 mg
Dr: I can’t believe you have wasted MY time by phoning me with this. It’s clearly TEN mg. I took this RX to every other doctor in the clinic AND the pharmacist in the pharmacy next door and they ALL said it was clearly 10mg. Use your heads and stop wasting my time!
(sidenote-all the doctors in this office have equally bad writing, and the pharmacist next door to them would dispense arsenic if they told him to)
The pharmacist who took the call basically said “thank you I will fill 10mg” and hung up and was speechless. If the doctors would take 30 seconds to write each prescription legibly instead of scrawling like kindergarten children, it would save EVERYBODY time… Who wasted the time here?? We did… phoning, holding, faxing, dealing with irate customer who needed their medication and waiting. He did by taking the rx on the go-round of the clinic to see if the other doctors could read it instead of just clarifying it by writing TEN and having it faxed back to us.
On to the reading issue. I cannot count the number of times we have faxed things to doctor’s offices and received a fax back with “ok <insert signature>” Doesn’t matter if we are requesting a simple refill, asking them to submit a special auth to an insurance plan, or have written an essay regarding an interaction, “ok <insert signature>” This means we have to fax them back or phone and say.. “WTF!!!” Welll we don’t really say that, but boy, would I love to!!
One patient I can recall had a long list of medications that she had refilled once every 3 months. The patient would write out the list, take it to her doctor, who would sign the bottom and issue triplicates for the multiple narcotics on the list. What the doctor didn’t pay attention to is the fact that there were several medications listed more than once… there were numerous duplications in drug classifications (who in the world needs 5 different types of laxatives?!) “ok <insert signature>” I guess someone who is taking 1600 oxycontin 80, 400 percocet, and 800 tylenol 4, every 3 months… can’t poop… hell I am surprised she even manages to walk with all those narcs.