How can you refill your prescription after your doctors’ office permanently closes? This just happened to my daughter (they notified her 3 weeks after the office closed) and it will take months for her to get an appt with a new doctor taking new patients. She had to wait months to get into see this one, so not happy about waiting again.
Have you tried Minute Clinic?
https://www.cvs.com/minuteclinic/services/refills-and-renewals
Says they do one time refills. Might last you till you can get an appointment.
If there isn’t one hear you, you could try any walk-in clinic.
Urgent care should be able to write a prescription for her. It seems odd that the clinic did not give any warning that it was closing.
It is odd that the office closed without warning. My daughter learned this when they called to cancel the appt she had scheduled for next week. WTF? Apparently the doctor is leaving the specialty. Maybe that’s part of it – since she was a specialist, they assume everyone has a GP who can continue the prescriptions? Why can’t they just make her prescription valid for the rest of the year so she can get refills until she finds a new doc? And I don’t know what happens to the patients’ records. What a mess.
Your daughter could also compare the cost and convenience of using an online telehealth medical service to using an urgent care. Having available her prescription medication and the letter from the doctor’s office will simplify her visit.
Was there another specialist who your daughter’s physician sent reports to? She could contact any site that did laboratory or imaging tests. Your daughter’s State Board of Medicine should have guidelines for obtaining copies of medical records. The American Medical Association has an article on “obtaining medical records from closed practices.”
I assume this physician was not part of a group practice? If he wasn’t I would have expected the office to provide some names of alternative doctors. If he was in a group she should be able to see someone else in the group.
Refilling a Rx from another physician is done at the discretion of a new physician. Any good physician will want to have a medical history to make sure the med is appropriate, since he could be sued if it is not and causes a reaction.
Patients are entitled to COPIES of medical records for a reasonable cost. However, obtaining them is a problem if the office just closed abruptly. Any good physician MUST keep them somewhere to defend himself against malpractice. Most medical records are computerized these days.
With low reimbursements and impediments to collections, it is easy for medical practices to go belly up these days- especially with low Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements. Some medical practices have such low profits that the physician decides he wants to give up and work for somebody else.
All states require her medical records to be kept up to seven years or more. When I had to close my practice due to illness. I notified all my patients in writing and made referrals to others I recommended. Then, on my website I told them where and how to obtain their medical records with an organization I hired who complied with state HIPPAA regulations to safeguard their records for seven years.
If this information is not noted anywhere, contact the State Medical License Board to get more information on her doctor and her records.
Update. The old doctor referred my daughter to a new specialist in the same town (small town, I didn’t know there was more than one). She called for an appt and the first available is in December. Meanwhile, neither the old doctor nor the new one will authorize refills of her meds. This is crazy.
Suggestion: unless it is a psychotropic drug, order it from another country. Better yet go to a foreign country like El Salvador and buy all you want without a Rx and save a lot of money in the process, until she can get an appointment with a new doc here.
I regularly have my wife’s relatives buy drugs that are expensive here and send them to me.