Ohio backpedals on rule that limits prescription drug transfers

The Ohio State Board of Pharmacy is taking steps to reverse a rule that limits state residents from transferring a prescription from one pharmacy to another more than once per year.

The rule, which took effect Jan. 1, was popular among pharmacists but criticized by consumers, who labeled it anti-competitive, the Columbus Dispatch reported.

The Board of Pharmacy has filed paperwork with the Register of Ohio that would overturn the rule, which curiously was essentially dictated to state residents by the Board of Pharmacy; legislators and voters had little say in the matter.

The Register of Ohio is to hold a hearing in May to discuss changing the rule back to its original form. The change should be in effect by June, said William Winsley, executive director of the Board of Pharmacy.

The decision to reverse the one-transfer-per-year rule came about after complaints by consumers and newspapers, said Ernest Boyd, president of the Ohio Pharmacists Association.

Advocates of the one-transfer rule said it was about patient safety. Transferring prescriptions multiple times can lead to miscommunication amongst pharmacists that could bring errors that hurt patients, they said.

But that claim may have been a dubious one because the Board of Pharmacy has no data on errors caused by prescription transfers, just anecdotal evidence from pharmacists. That would seem to only fuel consumers’ suspicions that the one-transfer rule was really about pharmacies protecting themselves from competition.

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the one-transfer rule pitted big retail drug chains like Walgreens and CVS against small, independent pharmacists. That is, the rule carved out an exception for transfers between locations as long as the prescription records were housed within the same computer system.

So for example, a patient would have been able to transfer her prescription from the Walgreens near her home to the one by her office, and again to the location by her child’s school to any number of other Walgreens locations that she prefers. With a small, independent retailer, the patient could transfer once a year and that’s it.

But now fears of hardships the one-transfer rule would impose on Ohio prescription drug buyers appear to be melting away, and, as of June, consumers look likely to be able to once again change prescription locations at will.