Do Florida Online Pharmacies have Prescription Quotas
Online pharmacies continue to grow rapidly. The growth is largely based on their claims of cost savings and convenience of doorstep delivery of prescriptions. The industry claims that cost savings are achieved based on the elimination of the brick and mortar store. However, according to an article in the Baltimoresun.com, pharmacists working for Medco Health Systems are claiming that cost savings are also coming from quotas that may lead to medication errors.
A former Medco pharmacist in Tampa Florida is so concerned about the quotas causing mistakes in filling prescriptions that he began a hunger strike. Raj Bhat was a pharmacist in Medco's Tampa mail order pharmacy filling plant until he was fired in 2005. He claims he was fired because of complaints about the company's prescription filling quota of up to 45 prescriptions an hour. The company says they fired him because of poor job performance. Bhat started the hunger strike in early July of 2010 after a trial court dismissed his lawsuit against the company. The lawsuit claimed damages as a result of his firing. Although Bhat has appealed the trial court's decision, the appellate process can be very slow. It may take years before an appellate court ultimately decides whether his lawsuit can move forward.
Apparently, the United Steel Workers Union has taken up the cause because Medco pharmacists have joined their union. The Baltimore Sun articled quoted the Steelworkers Union as saying the company makes high demands on its professionals, requiring them to work at a pace they think is too fast. Pharmacists have complained for years that working at too fast a pace can lead to errors in judgment resulting in filling prescriptions with the wrong medicine or the wrong dose of medicine. For example, Daniel Hussar, a pharmacy professor at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia says "The large chains push their pharmacists to work 10, 12, 14 hours a day at a pace that is often a blur."
Medco denies it has quotas. Instead, the company says "Our longtime operating policy is that we have performance standards to ensure we maximize the delivery of both quality of care and cost effectiveness." As a Florida pharmacy error lawyer, this statement sounds to me like corporate double speak. After all, any definition of performance standards that revolves around filling prescriptions would have to involve quotas. Especially in light of the number of former employees that have surfaced willing to say the company has quotas.
Unfortunately, the Florida Board of Pharmacy does not believe it has the power to regulate the number of prescriptions a pharmacist fills in any given time period. Their rational is that no specific law states the board can set a specific limit on the number of prescriptions filled. However, it appears the board may be missing the point. They law does give the Board the power to protect the public health. Based the number of pharmacy error injuries that have been blamed on pharmacists moving too fast, it would seem to me that quotas do affect public health.
