Faxing Rx's

[Steve Machol]

FYI: I don't have the time or patience to baby-sit Chip any more so all of his posts and the posts quoting him have been removed. Nice job Chip.

[MarcE]

Do any Canadian's resent the fact that so many of your southern neighbors "invaded" your forum and tried to impose our capitalistic and imperialistic will??

[tmorse]

Do any Canadian's resent the fact that so many of your southern neighbors "invaded" your forum and tried to impose our capitalistic and imperialistic will??

NAH... we're just as capitalistic and imperialistic as ya'll.;)

[AdmiralKnight]

Do any Canadian's resent the fact that so many of your southern neighbors "invaded" your forum and tried to impose our capitalistic and imperialistic will??

Only the bits where they start quoting laws. :D

[icare]

It is time consuming and a bit inconvenient to disrupt whatever task you were doing, be it answering patient questions, filing insurance assisting the people who happen to be in your office currently or what have you to take care of faxing copies of Rx's to various offices, providing duplicate receipts for flex care, etc. The question is.. is it enough to warrant an additional charge to do so...

My answer is that is depends on what you want your office to portray to your patients. If you want to be the discount provider where everything is cheaper than Walmart, then perhaps if patients are already buying services ala carte, a fee would be in order to keep prices lower for the rest of the public. However if you are an office (like mine) where we try to promote the idea that we will take care of you, and patient's come first! Then perhaps a seperate fee would not be a wise move, though if it is seriously taking that much time away and causing significant costs for labor, ink, paper, etc.. then perhaps a minor adjustment to your exam fee is in order to cover those costs.

Brilliant rationale.

[HarryChiling]

Sir/Ma'am, it seems the place you had your exam done isn't willing to fax over the Rx, if you'd like I can squeeze you in to see our doctor and our office policy is to never hold your records hostage. Or we can wait and see what they'll say next?

[AdmiralKnight]

I always fax them, personally. They payed for the rx. Even if we gave them one and they lost it, are you really going to risk loosing a long term patient to get a couple bucks from them?

[HarryChiling]

I always fax them, personally. They payed for the rx. Even if we gave them one and they lost it, are you really going to risk loosing a long term patient to get a couple bucks from them?

, penny wise pound foolish.

[kws6000]

Sir/Ma'am, it seems the place you had your exam done isn't willing to fax over the Rx, if you'd like I can squeeze you in to see our doctor and our office policy is to never hold your records hostage. Or we can wait and see what they'll say next?

This will only work if the patient is due for an exam anyway,unless your dr is willing to work for free.

[HarryChiling]

This will only work if the patient is due for an exam anyway,unless your dr is willing to work for free.

The patient is given an option a choice that the other office denies them, should they chose to wait fro the Rx, I will do my best to get it from the office and often times the patient sees how difficult it is an refuses to go back. If the patient decides to see our offices doctors we never give the exam away and it's not a hard sell. You think that a doctor that holds an Rx hostage is a good doctor? The good ones don't need to play these games, so often I suggest if our office is going to make the glasses they might as well get an exam our professionals can trust and they can have confidence in. Bottom line is that the longer the doctors office takes to fax em the Rx the more time I have to win the patient over for additional services and all gloves are off.

[Jubilee]

I have no doubts about your logic Harry. No doubts whatsoever. However thinking about my own work arrangement where there are days when I am running the office by myself, I may not be able to fax that RX over in the next 5 mins. If I am assisting patients in my office, Triaging by phone, or such things, I feel like my focus should be on those currently in my office demanding my attention. Or heck even on days where there are a few of us, If one of us is doing visual fields, a second helping patients in the dispensary and a third taking care of insurance and payments.. shouldn't our focus be on those who are in our office and there to spend money with us?

Please note, we will do everything in our power to try and get that RX faxed ASAP, however it has taken me an hour at times when I am presented with a steady stream of pickups, repairs, and emergency issues.

(and yes, we are busy enough that we need to hire an additional person, but that would require someone worth hiring)

[AdmiralKnight]

That's different though. If Harry calls you up, asks for the Rx and you say "Yeah, no problem, it might take a bit though, we're a bit busy.", he's most likely not going to throw out that option to the person. However, if he calls and you give him a hastle, or are trying to avoid faxing, that's a different story.

[HarryChiling]

I don't go at the patient like a ravenous wolf if that's what is coming across. Most offices will fax the Rx no problem but some like mentioned hide behind the HIPAA, then I fax them a copy of:

http://seikoeyewear.com/CE/CE9.html (bottom of the page ECP Communications)

After that any objection to with holding the Rx is just unprofessional and often I will ask them to fax over a consent form, and I show that to the patient along with the article from above.

Being busy is totally different than trying to blow someone off. Ultimately my goal is to provide that patient in front of me with eyewear and that is there goal as well, I pride myself on doing my job well and in almost every case I can get them their Rx or sell them on a more competent exam by professionals that not only understand the laws but understadn that they come first.

BTW if you called our office for an Rx it would arrive at your office before you hung up the phone. It's called Winfax, you set it up as a printer and then hit print in your EMR software and send it the Winfax printer and punch in the fax number in the box provided. Instead of taking the name down on paper I am searching in our computer, instead of writing down the fax number on paper I am punching it into the fax field in winfax. No additional effort, no need for additional patient charges. Very cheap to set up, less than what most doctors spend on additional equipment in their offices that do nothing more than provide unnecessary tests.

[tmorse]

It is time consuming and a bit inconvenient to disrupt whatever task you were doing, be it answering patient questions, filing insurance assisting the people who happen to be in your office currently or what have you to take care of faxing copies of Rx's to various offices, providing duplicate receipts for flex care, etc. The question is.. is it enough to warrant an additional charge to do so...

Then perhaps a seperate fee would not be a wise move, though if it is seriously taking that much time away and causing significant costs for labor, ink, paper, etc.. then perhaps a minor adjustment to your exam fee is in order to cover those costs.

Yet what about the time, effort, expense, frustation, etc that retail optical dispensaries routinely absorb doing no-charge re-do's for DR errors?
It may be that a few opticals charge the patient, but the vast majority do not, for fear of offending the Dr. and losing future Rx's.
Optician store owners suck it up, and OD/OMD's should do likewise when their staff has to FAX a replacement Rx. Poor Babys...:p

[Jubilee]

Well we keep 90% of our exams in the office dispensary. We get more remakes from the MDs down the way (typically post cataract who refuse to do co-management) then we do from our own office. Our lab routinely tells us we have the lowest remakes by far..

However, I do see your point. I realize you are there to do a job, the same as we are. Everyone has their own business philosophy based upon the experience they want to provide. They may or may not be in alignment.

My office does not charge for such things. I get maybe 3 calls a month for Rx's, so it really is no big deal. Then there are times like last week when one particular internet contact lens company felt the need to do an rx verification for a patient 5 times over 3 days. Each one coming at a time when I was in the middle of working with patients. I had responded on at least 3 of those occasions with a fax. However they still felt the need to keep calling us.

[icare]

Sir/Ma'am, it seems the place you had your exam done isn't willing to fax over the Rx, if you'd like I can squeeze you in to see our doctor and our office policy is to never hold your records hostage. Or we can wait and see what they'll say next?

Please forgive me, Harry. With all due respect I find this type of baiting unprofessional. I don't know if your doc agrees.

When ODs start hawking exams, or let others do it for them, bad things happen. Next thing you know, the exam will be free with a pair of glasses.

[kidsparrow]

I honestly think that the patient comes first, and that it does me no harm to fax his or her Rx in a timely manner to whatever optical they choose. We use iFile in our office, so it takes me about ten seconds to print, stamp, and fax it. If it's such a big deal for other offices, maybe they should find a system that allows them to do it as easily, like Winfax, as Harry suggested. As busy as we are, I find the time to comply with any request.

I've only had one instance when an optical employee was rude to me, and even then I sent the Rx over. It's not about me, or her, it's about the patient.

But having said that, rudeness serves no one!

[chip anderson]

Bravo Kid!

[HarryChiling]

Please forgive me, Harry. With all due respect I find this type of baiting unprofessional. I don't know if your doc agrees.

When ODs start hawking exams, or let others do it for them, bad things happen. Next thing you know, the exam will be free with a pair of glasses.

It's not baiting, look some patients come to our office because they have been coming to me for years, I don't care where they get there exams done, but if there doctor is behaveing unprofessionally and decides that careing for the patient takes a back seat to his allmighty job, then it's my goal to help MY PATIENT get everything they need.

No ones letting me hawk and exam, I am offering our offices professional services to a patient when there current offices falls short of expectations. Again icare as long as the office isn't holding the script out of mallace then there is no problem and no issue, but when the double talk starts and the laws are misconstrued to hold onto a script that isn't that expensive anyway the doctor cheapens his service and loses the patient to our office.

[kidsparrow]

Next thing you know, the exam will be free with a pair of glasses.

The last optical retail store I worked for, this WAS the case. The promotion was "Free Eye Exam with Purchase of Glasses." We would just charge upfront for the eye exam and then subtract that cost from the glasses purchase.

edit: Sorry to de-rail; I know this wasn't the issue at hand!

[chip anderson]

It was also very, very Illegal Kid.

[kidsparrow]

Is it in Canada? Or is it a fuzzy issue?

[chip anderson]

Kid:
Don't know about Cannada, is in U.S.

[For-Life]

It takes that long to fax two rx's a week?

Seriously!

What are you going to charge them? $20 each. What is that, an hours work.


Is it that you feel that it is taking too much time or are you annoyed that they are going elsewhere?

[optical maven]

For me personally, trying to get someone to stay and buy glasses when they are not interestd, only leads to animosity from the patient. Those who do this may have short term gain, but long term they won't see the person again. With so much lousy work done at optical stores (the Adaptar specials, poly as a high index, poor AR coatings) people eventually come back and stay.