Prescriptions and Referrals to Specialists

A new prescription or referral to a specialist usually requires an office visit first.

For prescription renewals, please call your pharmacist with the prescription number and the pharmacist will call us if necessary for approval, unless you get your prescriptions filled in our office. It may take up to 3 days to complete the research and paperwork for a refill. Please do not contact our office for refills as it may cause additional delays. Call the pharmacy where you had your last prescription filled. After you call the pharmacy, you may be contacted by our office to schedule an appointment if it has been too long since the original prescription or if close supervision or testing is necessary. Otherwise we will reply to the pharmacy with your refill authorization. Calling our office to check on refill-progress causes us to pull your paperwork out of line every time to check on it, after which it might go to the end of the line again and be further delayed!

Please call before you run out of medicine. Be sure to plan ahead for weekends, travel needs or insurance company delays. Prescriptions can be difficult or impossible to renew on short notice or during a weekend when the provider on-call does not have your medical chart. Thus, refills will not be processed after hours or on weekends. Mail-In prescriptions for remote patients will be written only once a year unless your pharmacy plan changes. Please try to coordinate all your refills at one time.

For specialist referral, check your current insurance company Benefits Booklet for a list of authorized specialists. They change frequently, and your Booklet has the latest information. We don't have the Booklets for all the hundreds of insurance companies, but you can get one from your employer.

About Insurance
Prescription insurance-payment or specialist-referral authorization by your insurance plan may take up to two weeks for the insurance company to do all their paperwork back-and-forth with us, especially for newer or more expensive medicines or doctors. We focus on your health care, and provide you with what we believe is the best prescription or referral for you, at the time of your appointment. We do not profit from which prescription we write for you, or to which specialist we refer. Employers change insurance plans, and insurance plans change pharmacy-benefits and specialist-membership all the time, to save money. We cannot possibly keep track of all the insurance company changes every year. Your best option might be to pay for the first prescription or specialist-visit yourself right-away, so that you can have the benefit of the prescription or specialist until your insurance company finishes the paperwork, then reimburses you. If you are having a lot of problems with your insurance company not covering visits and prescriptions, or delaying your authorizations, you might want to select a different insurance company, or talk to your employer about it.

You can find information about Medicare drug benefits by clicking here.

If you would like to learn more about insurance company and employer tactics to reduce pharmacy benefits and costs, go to Insurance Drug Benefits

If you would like to check out your insurance company's Report Card, go to NCQA

©Bay Area Family Practice Inc. A Medical Group, 1850 Sullivan Ave, Suite 210, Daly City CA 94015 (next to Seton Medical Center)