Syracuse University Health Services switches to electronic prescriptions to comply with federal and state laws

It took Kasey Lanese 10 seconds online to get a refill for her prescriptions through Syracuse University Health Services.

“It tells me, ‘Pick up your prescription at 1:15’ or something like that,” Lanese said. “It’s pretty foolproof. Takes me five seconds.”

Lanese, a sophomore communications and rhetorical studies major at SU, said it took one call from her doctor’s office, and now she can get prescriptions filled whenever she wants.

SU Health Services is working on completing the switch from old-fashioned paper prescriptions to electronic prescribing by Sunday, which is the deadline to implement the process. The March 27 deadline was set last year when New York state Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature amended the Public Health Law and the Education Law to extend the implementation date. The extension aimed to increase the seriousness of the issue and give time for health service providers to transition, according to the New York State Department of Health.

Health service centers such as the one at SU are currently converting to computer software that meets federal security requirements and is registered with the Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement as they comply with Cuomo’s state law.

Michele Frontale, supervising pharmacist at SU Health Services, said the center has been going through a slow transition.

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“When I took over the pharmacy (in 2012) I really implemented a lot of the new pharmacy laws, so once we heard about electronic prescribing it was probably around 2013 that we started hearing about the mandate laws,” she said.

Frontale began implementing changes slowly, and Health Services was up and running with electronic prescribing of non-controlled substances by 2014.

Electronic prescribing of non-controlled substances means that students will not only be able to call in refills for non-controlled substances, but controlled substances as well, according to the New York State Department of Health website. Controlled substance electronic prescribing is more difficult because it requires software to be registered with the New York state Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), according to the wesbsite. Once the software is certified, Health Services is able to accept electronic prescriptions for controlled substances, which include any medications unable to be obtained without a prescription.

But, Frontale said, this can be controversial for college campuses seeing an increase in recreational prescription drug use.

In 2013, New York state passed the Prescription Drug Reform Act Internet System for Tracking Over-Prescribing (I-STOP) in order to prevent people from forging prescriptions for hydrocodone, oxycodones and other controlled substances.

Under the new I-STOP bill, when a controlled substance is dispensed from a pharmacy, it is reported to a registry online, according to the bill. All physicians are required by law to check this registry prior to writing the prescription to make sure that the patient doesn’t have a history of drug abuse.

“Because that’s what happens with the oxycodones and the oxycottons, a lot of (people) shop around … they’ll hop from ER to ER to get ‘scrips,” Frontale said.

Since pharmacies have live feeds, Frontale said, they can check the registry to see if patients have already had prescriptions filled recently. This helps with the decrease of prescribing controlled substances.

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This system encompasses all controlled prescriptions, including Attention Deficit Disorder medicine. Although I-STOP has addressed and improved the issue of overprescribing, opioid abuse is still prevalent.

In New York state from 2003–12, poisoning deaths involving opioids increased both in number and as a percentage of all drug poisoning deaths. Rates were highest among white males. In 2012, 70.7 percent of deaths involving an opioid also involved at least one other drug, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

“They’ve shown that this I-STOP regulation has decreased the distribution of hydrocodone and oxycodone and other things like that being prescribed,” Frontale said. “… But the downside is because of this decrease in pills and other controlled substances there has been an increase in heroin.”

A spokesman from New York State’s Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services confirmed that the office’s data showed an increase in the last three years in young people seeking treatment for opioid abuse, but said there was also an increase in mortality rates from heroin.

Frontale said it seems as though new crackdowns on prescribing of non-controlled and controlled substances has both its positive and negative consequences. Heroin is easy and cheap to get a hold of, she said, and it is also more harmful.

“Heroin is where all these deaths are coming from,” Frontale said. “There’s a give and take. We don’t know, (I-STOP) has definitely helped in overprescribing, but there’s still the prescribing of (opioids) and still the illicit use of them out in the college world.”

A 2015 study by researchers at The Ohio State University shows that 33.5 percent of undergraduates and 29.8 percent of graduate and professional students say it is easy or very easy to obtain prescription pain medications. New regulations surrounding prescribing are intended to lower these numbers, but there still are increases in the usage of drugs that are cheaper and easier to get.