New prescription refill policy at SCRMC begins August 1 Starting August 1st, SCRMC medical staff will no longer accept requests from patients for medication refills. All refill requests will need to go through patients’ pharmacists. “We are addressing two main issues with this new system–speed and safety/accuracy,” said SCRMC family physician, Dr. Bill Beyer. According to Beyer, SCRMC’s three clinics have been receiving more and more refill requests from many different sources—by phone, by letter, from patients’ family members or friends, and from pharmacies via fax and phone calls. “We also have people calling or stopping into the clinic for refills who don’t remember exactly what medication they were taking, the strength of the dose, and so on,” Beyer explained. “The situation has been getting increasingly confusing, time-consuming, and causing delays for patients during office visits. Given that we see approximately 78,000 patients each year, mistakes were being made, unfortunately, and we needed to correct that.” Again, the new system is actually very simple: when you need to refill a prescription, just contact your pharmacist. “Pharmacists always have a record of what they have dispensed to each patient,” explained Beyer. “The long-distance/mail order pharmacies have toll-free “800” numbers to call for refills. Patients who are using Schedule 2 narcotics and are required to have a written prescription each month, still only need to contact their pharmacist—who will in turn contact us. We will then write the patient’s prescription and email it to the pharmacist.” SCRMC providers are confident that this new system will both improve accuracy and speed the refill process for their patients. “Mistakes may still happen,” stated Beyer, “but they will be far less likely.”