(1157) Assessment of Pharmacists’ Knowledge of Dispensing Emergency Refills

Objectives: Often times, it takes several days or even longer for patients and their pharmacies to hear back from providers’ offices on medication refill requests. In instances where medication refill approvals are delayed and the patient has run out of their medications, it is important to consider the impact a lapse in medication therapy can have on patients’ overall adherence and therapy management. To combat this issue, laws allowing pharmacists to dispense emergency refills in certain situations exist. Despite these laws that are designed to help prevent patients from going without maintenance medications, interruptions in therapy still occur due to underutilization of emergency refills due to pharmacists’ unfamiliarity with the law in addition to the inability to get in contact with the prescriber. This study is being conducted on community pharmacists who are embedded in a federally qualified health center (FQHC) in northeast Ohio, and it aims to assess the practice site’s pharmacists’ knowledge of dispensing emergency refills as well as to determine if there is a change in their knowledge before and after implementation of a protocol outlining the use of emergency refills.

Methods: This prospective study will utilize a case-based questionnaire to assess the practice site’s pharmacists’ familiarity with the laws surrounding emergency refills. Questions will evaluate pharmacists’ knowledge and application skills of the appropriateness of issuing emergency refills, like when and how much to dispense, in specific scenarios as well as documentation. After completion of the questionnaire, pharmacists will be provided training on the practice site’s protocol outlining procedures for the determination, documentation, and billing of dispensing emergency refills by pharmacists. The same questionnaire will then be given to the pharmacists following four months of implementation of the protocol. The pre- and post-training scores for the questionnaire will be tracked, specifically looking at how many answers were changed from incorrect to correct. Each pharmacist’s paired scores will then be evaluated using descriptive statistics to measure % change.

Results: N/A

Conclusions: N/A