Although physicians dedicate their lives to ethically and compassionately caring for others, this unfortunately makes them a tantalizing target for fraudulent schemes. An estimated 3% of healthcare spending gets funneled into healthcare fraud accounts, based on statistics from The National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association (NHCAA). What’s more, the United States government estimates that the figure is 10% and that healthcare fraud could cost upwards of $300 billion.
Physicians possess the ability to write prescriptions for the gamut of pharmaceuticals, including controlled substances, providing doctors with a very powerful tool at their disposal. Permission to use this tool only comes after years upon years of required schooling and experience. This makes the idea of a forged prescription troublesome on many levels, and it is where pharmacists must serve as guardians against fraud. According to Naveed Saleh, MD, MS, forged prescriptions take various forms, including pilfered prescription pads, prescriptions written by false physicians, or alterations to actual prescriptions.
Dr. Saleh notes certain red flags to look out for: A physician writing an excessive number of prescriptions or prescribing a medication in excessive amounts; prescriptions for medications with opposite indications (eg, depressants and stimulants); a patient who is at the pharmacy too often; an obsessively neat script; a script that appears to be...
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