Thursday, May 18, 2017

Nice Try, Patient

The Old Switcheroo Trick

A patient comes to the register and asks to pick up his medication. I look in the will-call and there's nothing there for him. He says the computer called him, but then reluctantly admits that it was sometime last week. I tell him that we return things to stock after nine days. 

So I look at his profile and tell him it was probably his Lipofen. I fill his Lipofen for him in 3.5 minutes, he pays $25, and he's out the door.

I'm busy with other things and leave the empty bottle of Lipofen on the counter. I'm alone at the pharmacy today and throwing it in the trash would have meant me taking an extra step, so what the heck, it can wait until later. I'm taking lessons from Lazy RxMan.

A little while later Mr. Lipofen appears at the window with the bag, the receipt hanging out, and a labeled bottle of Avodart. He wants to know why I filled his AVODART when he needed LIPOFEN and he wants a REFUND of the $60 co-pay. Somehow Mr. Lipofen thinks that I'm going to fall for this voodoo and give him a $60 refund. 

"Uh, no... I filled your Lipofen." I show him the empty bottle of Lipofen that was conveniently on the counter and easy to grab. "It was $25." At first he tries to argue with me, but then looks at the receipt and realizes it says $25. The only thing I can surmise is that he thought he would somehow fool me into giving him a $60 refund when he paid $25 before.

Nice try, but the old RxMan couldn't be fooled today. Being lazy paid off.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I might give him a pass. It sounds like he just got confused and wasn't trying to pull anything over on you. Maybe he was, but if he's never done that before it may have been an honest mistake, especially if he's elderly. I can actually see my parents doing that. :o

Btw, you return to stock after 9 days? My pharmacy doesn't return to stock until 30 days.

Anonymous said...

30 days?? Most insurance companies only have a standard 14 day billing window to reverse a claim for a med never picked up. We give 10-14 days.

Anonymous said...

Huh, interesting. Yeah, I was dealing with a family emergency once and had to go out of town. The next day I got a call that my auto-refill was ready (I had enough, didn't need it for another couple weeks), so I called them and said I wasn't going to be able to pick it up for a few days. They told me it was ok, they held onto them for 30 days. This was a few years ago, perhaps that has changed? Or, while I do live in a big city,I live on the outskirts, so maybe it's just a slower pace and they do things differently.