Monday, October 15, 2012

Alabama Board of Pharmacy Discussion Regarding Call Centers for Compounding Pharmacies


I will go ahead and tell you this morning that
12 we don't have anything structured relative to
13 compounding to talk about this morning. We wanted
14 actually to follow-up and see if there were any
15 other comments that you may have, so that really is
16 our intent this work session I guess is for us to
17 continue hearing thoughts and pooling our thoughts,
18 if you will. So with that, I will open the floor
19 to anyone who wants to make comments about
20 compounding or bring up other issues relative to
21 compounding at this point.
22 Gentleman in the back right-hand corner, I'm
23 sorry, I don't remember your name.DR. MARTIN: Jeff.
2 MR. SANDERS: Jeff. If you don't mind, I
3 think those are concerns, so if you would kind of
4 restate your question from the rules hearing.
5 MR. HOOVER: Yeah, Jeffrey Hoover, Hibbett
6 Patient Care.
7 What I'm talking about is our patients, and
8 it's widely-known I think in the compounding
9 community, that there are compounding pharmacies
10 that are structured in a way that receive in a
11 large number of prescriptions from sales reps. And
12 these sales reps, because these prescriptions come
13 in, need to be handled by someone in a particular
14 way and they started setting up call centers to
15 handle these prescriptions and call centers run by
16 people who are not technicians. And in the past I
17 have worked with the State board, with Henry Burks,
18 on trying to let you guys know of certain things
19 that I know that are going on.
20 And it's a model in compounding that I don't
21 think -- it's a model that's being pervasive that
22 you're seeing over and over again because people
23 are splitting off and trying to do it. And it'sone of those concerns that I wanted to get
2 your-guys' opinion on to see what we should do or
3 what should be done or if there's rules against
4 this type of thing happening.
5 And what I stated earlier was: There are call
6 centers calling patients to get refills, to
7 generate prescriptions from these compounding
8 pharmacies, and it's because that these compounding
9 pharmacies are fielding prescriptions from outside
10 of an arm's reach. There's no way these patients
11 can come in and talk to a pharmacist or walk in the
12 door and even hand off a prescription because
13 they're in multi-states, they're in multi --
14 they're all over the state of Alabama, and then
15 some of them are in 48 states; some of them are in
16 8 states. And it's one of those things that I
17 haven't heard directly from the board, you know,
18 what we can and can't do. And when I saw the
19 legislation come up about the call center and I saw
20 the verbiage on it, I'm saying, well, that's
21 excluding these other pharmacies that have these
22 call centers. And if that's the case, then how are
23 they operating? What's going on? What don't I

Rest of transcript can be found on Alabama Board of Pharmacy website here


No comments: