A new rule handed down by the Ohio State Board of Pharmacy limits state residents from transferring a prescription from one pharmacy to another more than once per year.
Advocates of the new rule, which takes effect Jan. 1, say it’s about patient safety. Transferring prescriptions multiple times can lead to miscommunication amongst pharmacists that could bring errors that hurt patients, they say. Plus, it seems, pharmacists are simply tired of all the paperwork created by prescription transfers, the Columbus Dispatch reported.
The new rule mimics the Drug Enforcement Administration’s controlled substances regulation, which also limits prescription transfers of controlled substances to once per year, Drug Topics reported.
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Additionally, the Board of Pharmacy’s executive director complained about “questionable marketing practices” in which pharmacies compete so fiercely for new customers that they constantly offer coupons for new or transferred prescriptions.
“The questionable marketing practices of some pharmacies in offering coupons for transfers has resulted in some ludicrous situations, to the point that the board is concerned about patient safety,” William Winsley told Drug Topics. “Some people transfer every refill.”
Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the new rule pits big retail drug chains like Walgreens and CVS against small, independent pharmacists. That is, the rule carves out an exception for transfers between locations as long as the prescription records are housed within the same computer system.
So for example, a patient would be able to transfer her prescription from the Walgreens near her home to the one by her office, and again to the location by her child’s school to any number of other Walgreens locations that she prefers. With a small independent retailer, the patient can transfer once a year and that’s it.
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So that disparity seems a pretty significant competitive advantage for the big chains in terms of consumer convenience, and independent pharmacists are understandably concerned about the toll it could take on their businesses.
Critics of the new rule also worry that it limits competition among retailers and it creates problems for people who spend significant chunks of the year in different cities or states. For example, an elderly Ohio couple that spends the winter months in Florida could transfer their prescriptions to a pharmacy in the Sunshine State but couldn’t transfer them back to Ohio once they return home after the spring thaw — unless the couple was transferring between different locations of the same large retailer, of course.
