The health and well-being of our patients is our number one priority. Our pharmacists follow comprehensive quality assurance processes to ensure prescription safety and accuracy. Every prescription dispensed at CVS/pharmacy undergoes a multi-step review by a pharmacist prior to being dispensed to a patient.
As a health care company that strives to help people on their path to better health, we seek out new technology and innovations to enhance safety, we engage with industry experts for independent evaluations of our systems, and we are committed to continually improving our processes to help ensure that prescriptions are dispensed safely and accurately.
Prescription errors are a very rare occurrence, but when they happen we do everything we can to take care of the patient's needs, including contacting their prescriber to address any health concerns. We also examine how an error may have occurred as a critical part of preventing errors in the future, so we encourage our pharmacy teams to report such incidents.
Regarding some of the News4 I-Team's other questions:
• Like other companies, CVS/pharmacy measures the quality and effectiveness of the services we provide in our pharmacies to ensure we are meeting our customers’ expectations. Our systems are designed to help our pharmacists manage and prioritize their work to best serve their patients.
• The use of automated counting and filling technology has been commonplace in the pharmacy industry for a number of years and we utilize this technology in select store locations to assist the pharmacy team in the preparation of prescriptions. Every prescription we fill undergoes our multi-step quality assurance review prior to being dispensed to a patient.
• We employ thousands of pharmacy technicians in the states of Virginia and Maryland and the number of licensure issues cited by the states’ boards of pharmacy last year is very low – in the single digits for each state. These incidents typically involved individuals who did not renew their licenses in a timely manner, which did not impact quality and safety in the pharmacy.
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• ReadyFill is a free, opt-in service that helps people stay on their maintenance medications as prescribed in order to reduce the risk of deteriorating health and avoid more costly health care treatment. Only prescriptions that are intended to treat chronic disease and have refills remaining are eligible for ReadyFill. Once enrolled in this program, patients can stop the service for any of their medications at any time. We have strict procedures and processes in place to ensure that we are only paid by insurers for those prescriptions that are picked up by our patients.
