Quote:
Originally Posted by 1990C4S
Just an FYI: Where I live some doctors are telling their patients not to use Costco's pharmacy. The prices are better, but the number of errors made are significant.
If you do use Costco make sure you check your prescription matches your pills.
|
Good advice for anyone taking prescription drugs.
What do you think the odds are that derogatory Costco warning is a direct result of the pharm-reps coaxing?
Or maybe the issue is prescription verification systems.
Quote:
Costco customer
So at the end of that week I picked up the prescriptions while shopping at Costco with my family. As usual, I glanced at the list to make sure they were the right drugs. However, what I didn’t notice then – and actually didn’t notice until three days later when I went to use one – was that one of them was the right drug, wrong dosage. It was the 15mg version but I’m on the 30mg version. Of course, it was the brand-name, no-generic-available one so I’d paid the bigger $30 copay.
I phoned Costco the next morning and explained the problem to the pharmacist. I figured that since I had signed for the pickup and then taken three days to notice the error, that they’d a) tell me it was my new doctor’s fault and to call him myself, and b) too bad on the $30.
I was wrong! The Costco pharmacist was extremely pleasant and helpful. He could see that they had faxed the request properly to the doctor, but said that the electronic prescription filing system my doctor uses (which is apparently a big national one) is highly prone to errors, and that the doctor had probably clicked on the wrong dosage in a list of choices. The pharmacist went on to say that they have tons of problems with that system, from wrong dosages like this to wrong directions to even the wrong patients with same or similar names. He said the system is set up in a way that makes errors easy.
|