Implementing PrescribeIT can help keep prescription fraud in check

March is Fraud Prevention Month. Rosemary Rofail, a pharmacist in the Greater Toronto Area, discusses the challenges pharmacists face in curtailing prescription fraud and how implementing PrescribeIT^® can help.

How does prescription fraud affect our healthcare system?

Every year in Canada, over 250 million new and renewed prescriptions are issued by prescribers to patients and at the core, the role of the pharmacy is to ensure those medications are dispensed safely and accurately to the right patient. Any controlled substance can be a target for prescription fraud but opioids are by far the biggest target.

Pharmacies are one of the primary gateways to ensuring that drugs are being dispensed to the right people and not being diverted elsewhere. As we see the opioid epidemic continue to worsen, it puts extra strain on pharmacists to ensure we are confident in the provenance of the prescriptions we’re filling.

What are some of the biggest challenges to curbing prescription fraud?

Time is a big limiting factor. For pharmacists like myself in Ontario and in other provinces like B.C., we now have an expanded scope of practice. It becomes difficult to navigate your time between treating minor ailments, administering vaccines, dispensing and then doing detective work to verify the legitimacy of a prescription.

Many people engaging in prescription fraud have become very sophisticated at mimicking a prescription faxed by a doctor – how the headings look, what information is required on a prescription – causing fraudulent scripts to be increasingly challenging to identify. You can easily spend 15-20 minutes trying to determine whether a prescription is valid, researching the clinic and trying to track down the prescriber.

Why is technology like PrescribeIT valuable in combating prescription fraud?

It’s very difficult to verify that a fax is coming from the right person and even more so since the pandemic, when it became more common for physicians to work from home – so faxes are not necessarily coming from their office number.

PrescribeIT, a national e-prescribing service, connects community-based prescribers to retail pharmacies, enabling the secure, digital transmission of prescriptions, so we can see exactly where it originated from and I am guaranteed that it came from a legitimate prescriber.

PrescribeIT also has an integrated, secure messaging feature that allows us to communicate directly with the prescriber if any questions arise. I find prescribers are much more responsive on PrescribeIT than they are through fax so I’m not spending a chunk of time trying to track a prescriber down when I need to verify something – especially helpful now that we’re seeing more e-health services with physicians working out of multiple clinics.

PrescribeIT’s own data from the recent user survey shows that 83 percent of pharmacists and 65 percent of prescribers believe that PrescribeIT reduces the number of stolen and fraudulent prescriptions.

Does technology like PrescribeIT have a role to play in fighting the opioid epidemic?

Absolutely. Implementing systems like PrescribeIT is the logical next step towards eliminating the risk of prescriptions getting into the hands of people where the need is not warranted. In many states in the U.S., they are not even allowed to fill prescriptions for controlled substances without it being an e-prescription and I believe that we should be following suit and requiring every prescription for any controlled substance be issued through e-prescribing.

This sentiment is also echoed among my colleagues – 87 percent of pharmacists and 78 percent of prescribers recently surveyed by Canada Health Infoway expressed enhanced confidence in transmitting and receiving prescriptions for opioids and controlled substances via PrescribeIT.

What are the risks of continuing to rely on analog methods to prevent prescription fraud?

If we continue to rely on analog methods, the status quo will continue and we are at risk of the problem getting out of control, as we’re already seeing in Vancouver. During the pandemic when the rules were changed to allow prescriptions for certain medications to be called in, it was shocking how many we’d receive that were clearly fraudulent.

We need to be more stringent and take the steps necessary to close the loopholes. Tools like PrescribeIT that can reduce that time burden and ensure accuracy make life immensely easier and safer for everybody.