Pharmacology / 02.07.2024

A Step-by-Step Guide for Emergency Prescription Refill

Do you rely on prescription medication? Then it’s important to know how to get an emergency prescription refill, whether due to travel, misplacing, or forgetting to get one. Here is a comprehensive guide covering all the necessary actions to ensure you receive your prescription on time and without stress.

What Is an Emergency Prescription?

Emergency prescription refills are used when a patient suddenly loses access to the needed medication. Common situations requiring emergency refills include:
  • While traveling, you forget to bring your prescription medication.
  • During your trip, your medication was misplaced or broken.
  • Even with the best-laid plans, you run out of medication and forget to schedule a refill.
  • You lost your prescription, especially as you moved into a new house or you live in a busy home.
  • Your prescribing physician is unavailable because of emergencies, holidays, or vacations.
  • Unexpected changes in your health that necessitate taking your prescription more frequently or at higher dosages (if that was discussed with a healthcare provider).
  • Refills for medications may be required immediately in the event of new health difficulties or consequences.
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Author Interviews, Electronic Records, Pharmacology / 08.12.2021

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Bernard Esquivel Zavala, MD, PhD, MHA GenXys Chief Medical Officer MedicalResearch.com: What is the mission of GenXys? Response: Our mission at GenXys is to tailor the right treatment for each individual patient at the right time. GenXys founders, including Professors Pieter Cullis and Martin Dawes, were heavily involved in the precision medicine field from the very beginning, and they noticed a functional gap between the expectations and the actual clinical implementation of precision medicine Particularly, when it came to, at the time, the new field of pharmacogenetics. Their solution was to provide a comprehensive, user-friendly platform that organizes all patient data relevant to prescribing to provide the safest and most appropriate personalized prescribing options. Simply put, GenXys’ solutions were made by clinicians, for clinicians. The GenXys software suite collects patient information and categorizes that information, including pharmacogenetic data, based on clinical relevance and runs it through advanced condition -based algorithms to provide real time accurate prescribing options. It makes my life as a clinician easier and safer and gives me the confidence that I am not practicing ‘trial and error’ prescribing. Ideally, every healthcare provider should be using a real time medication decision support solution like ours, and not just for pharmacogenetic test results. Pharmacogenomics is just one piece. In fact, our core product, TreatGx™ can run with or without pharmacogenomics. Let's say that you've run it without pharmacogenomics, meaning that you are using this tool to organize and rapidly identify how biophysical factors, liver function, kidney function, comorbidities, and drug-drug interactions may impact the medication you're about to prescribe to your patient. This functionality alone is incredibly helpful. In fact, the factors I just mentioned likely account for 95% of the reasons why a patient does not respond to a particular medication or might have an adverse drug reaction. But the TreatGx platform will also highlight when the evidence supports bringing pharmacogenomic information into the mix. The right approach is bringing all those relevant clinical, biochemical, and molecular factors closer to the provider which will ultimately foster personalization. We will start treating the individual instead of the disease(s). As with any new technology, there are barriers to precision prescribing. This includes educational and emotional barriers. It’s important to educate providers and keep them up to date to help them understand the power that precision prescribing can bring into their practice—and the limitations—to set the right level of expectation. The Human Genome Project was finished in 2000, and there was a lot of buzz about pharmacogenomics even back in 2003. The field got a lot of traction in 2015. So, everyone thought, "Oh, this is going to be groundbreaking and quite disruptive. From now on my prescription is going to be a hundred percent accurate and safe." But it's not quite the whole story. Pharmacogenomics has to be considered as another piece of the puzzle. It's like saying that by having an MRI, you're curing cancer. It's just another piece of the treatment puzzle. There are also emotional barriers, where ego can factor into a decision. It can be uncomfortable for a physician to say, "I don't know this. Let me check it out. Let me explore it further, review, and come back to you." It's easier to say if I don't know it, that it doesn't work or isn’t relevant, rather than exposing yourself. And so that, in terms of the emotional piece, I would say is a big component. We can tackle the emotional component that element by fostering education and bringing education closer to providers. (more…)
Author Interviews, Opiods, Surgical Research / 30.12.2019

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Sunil Agarwal, MD Michigan Opioid Prescribing Engagement Network Ann Arbor, MI MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Excess opioid prescribing after surgery often leads to misuse and diversion into the community. To prevent excessive prescribing for acute pain, 31 states have implemented legislation that limits the duration of opioid prescriptions. Our study examined the effect of prescribing limits and postoperative opioid prescribing on surgical patients in Massachusetts and Connecticut, the first two states to implement opioid prescribing limits for acute pain after the CDC guidelines were released.  (more…)
Author Interviews, JAMA, Opiods, Primary Care / 30.08.2019

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Hannah T. Neprash, PhD Assistant Professor, Division of Health Policy and Management School of Public Health University of Minnesota  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Physicians play a pivotal role in the opioid epidemic and it's important to understand what factors that drive opioid prescribing. Variation in opioid prescribing across physicians has been well-documented, but there’s very little research on variation within physicians…which is surprising, given the widespread concern about time pressure and cognitive fatigue having a potentially detrimental effect on the quality of care provided by physicians. (more…)
Author Interviews, Brigham & Women's - Harvard, NEJM, Opiods / 13.03.2019

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Wenjia Zhu, PhD. Marshall J. Seidman Fellow Department of Health Care Policy Harvard Medical School  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: The current opioid epidemic continues to cause deaths and tremendous suffering in the United States, driven in large part by overuse of prescription opioids. Of special concern are new opioid prescriptions, i.e. opioids given to patients who have not used opioids before, which research tells us are an important gateway to long-term opioid use, misuse, overdoes and death. Recently, in their efforts to curb over prescribing of opioids, the CDC issued guidelines (December 2015 in draft form; March 2016 in final version) to encourage opioid prescribers to limit the use, duration and dose of opioids, particularly opioids to first-time users. Despite these, little is known about the prescribing of opioids to first-time users on a national scale, particularly among commercially insured patients. In this study, we examined national monthly trends in the rate at which opioid therapy was started among commercially insured patients. Using administrative claims from Blue Cross Blue Shield Association commercial insurers from 2012 to 2017, we analyzed more than 86 million commercially insured patients across the United States. (more…)
Author Interviews, CDC, JAMA, Opiods / 12.02.2019

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Gery Guy, PhD, MPH Injury Center CDC MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: This study examined opioid prescribing at the national and county-level in 2015 and 2017. During 2015 to 2017, the amount of opioids prescribed decreased 20.1% in the United States. The amount of opioids prescribed per person varies substantially at the county-level. The average amount of opioids prescribed in the highest quartile of counties was nearly 6 times the amount in the lowest quartile. Reductions in opioid prescribing could be related to policies and strategies aimed at reducing inappropriate prescribing, increased awareness of the risks associated with opioids, and release of the CDC Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain. (more…)
Author Interviews, JAMA, Neurology, Outcomes & Safety, Parkinson's, Pharmacology, University of Pennsylvania / 04.10.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Allison W. Willis, MD, MS Assistant Professor of Neurology Assistant Professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology Senior Fellow, Leonard Davis Institute Senior Scholar, Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: This study was motivated by my own experiences as a neurologist-neuroscientist. I care for Parkinson disease patients, and over the year, have had numerous instances in which a person was taking a medication that could interact with their Parkinson disease medications, or could worsen their PD symptoms. (more…)
Author Interviews, JAMA, Opiods / 09.07.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Tyler Winkelman MD, MSc  Clinician-Investigator Division of General Internal Medicine, Hennepin Healthcare Center for Patient and Provider Experience, Hennepin Healthcare Research Institute Assistant Professor Departments of Medicine & Pediatrics University of Minnesota MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Opioid overdose deaths continue to escalate, and there have been reports that jails and prisons are bearing the brunt of the opioid epidemic. However, it wasn’t known, nationally, how many people who use opioids were involved in the criminal justice system. We also didn’t have recent estimates of common physical and mental health conditions among people with different levels of opioid use. We used two years of national survey data to understand these associations, which are critical in developing a public health response to the opioid epidemic. (more…)
Author Interviews, CDC, JAMA, Pediatrics / 15.05.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Craig M. Hales, MD, MPH, MS CDR, U.S. Public Health Service Division of Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys National Center for Health Statistics Centers for Disease Control and Prevention MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Monitoring trends in prescription medication use among children and adolescents is an important part of understanding the health of youth in the U.S. and the healthcare they receive. For this study we used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey or NHANES, which is a nationally representative survey of the US population and as part of this face-to-face survey in the home, we ask participants about their prescription medication use in the last 30 days and collect information about the prescription directly from the medication package. (more…)
Addiction, Author Interviews, JAMA, Opiods, Pharmaceutical Companies / 14.05.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: “Big Lunch Extras Reading” by Big Lunch Extras is licensed under CC BY 2.0Scott E. Hadland, MD, MPH, MS Assistant Professor of Pediatrics | Boston University School of Medicine Boston Medical Center Director of Urban Health & Advocacy Track | Boston Combined Residency Program Boston, MA 02118 MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Numerous pharmaceutical companies have received media attention for their role in promoting opioid prescribing through speaker programs and other marketing plans in which large-value payments are given to a small number of doctors to promote opioids. In our study, we sought to tell the other side of the story. We wanted to identify whether low-value marketing, including industry-sponsored meals, which are commonplace in the US, were associated with increased opioid prescribing. We found that 1 in 14 doctors received opioid marketing from pharmaceutical companies in 2014, and those that received marketing prescribed 9% more opioids the following year. With each additional meal a doctor received, he or she prescribed more and more opioids the following year. Our sample included 43% of the active physician workforce in the US, suggesting how widespread and far-reaching this effect might be. (more…)
Author Interviews, CDC, Infections, JAMA / 26.03.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Katherine Fleming-Dutra, MD, senior author Deputy Director Office of Antibiotic Stewardship CDC MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: As noted in a previous study, antibiotics are prescribed more for sinus infections than any other illness in the United States. We found that almost 70% of antibiotic prescriptions were for 10 days or longer, whereas 5-7 days is recommended for most patients when antibiotics are needed. In addition, more than 20% of antibiotic prescriptions for sinus infections were for 5 days of azithromycin, even though guidelines recommend against prescribing azithromycin for sinus infections. (more…)
Author Interviews, Opiods / 19.03.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Brian J. Piper, PhD, MS Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Department of Basic Sciences, Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine, Scranton PA 18509  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?  Response: The US is experiencing an opioid crisis. There were 63,800 drug overdose deaths in 2016 which is three-fold higher than in 1999. Drug overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids like fentanyl increased 27-fold. Overdoses may even have contributed to decreases in the US lifespan. Emergency Room visits involving opioids have also shown recent increases, particularly in the Southwest and Western US. The US accounts for less than 5% of the world’s population but consumed over two-thirds (69.1%) of the world’s supply of six opioids (fentanyl: 30.1%, methadone: 48.1%, morphine: 51.2%, hydromorphone: 53.0%, oxycodone: 73.1% and hydrocodone: 99.7%) in 2014. The goal of this study was to examine changes in medical use of ten opioids within the United States, and US Territories, from 2006 to 2016 as reported to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Automation of Reports and Consolidated Orders System (ARCOS). Prior estimates of the Morphine Mg Equivalent (MME), per person in the US (640), although much higher than most other developed countries, may be an underestimate because of a federal regulation (42 CFR Part 2) that prevents reporting methadone from narcotic treatment programs. We discovered that prescription opioid use peaked in 2011 (389.5 metric ton MMEs) and has been rapidly declining (346.5 in 2016). Relative to 2011, there were decreases in hydrocodone (–28.4%); oxymorphone (–28.0%); fentanyl (–21.4%); morphine (–18.9%); oxycodone (–13.8%); and meperidine (–58.0%). However, there was a pronounced increase in buprenorphine (75.2%). Similar changes were observed from 2015 to 2016 with a statistically significant reduction in all opioids except buprenorphine which was increased. There were substantial geographical variations in rates with a seven fold difference between the highest Morphine Milligram Equivalents in 2016 (Rhode Island = 2,624 mg/person) relative to Puerto Rico (351 mg/person). Two drugs used in treating an opioid use disorder (methadone and buprenorphine) accounted for over-half (52%) of the total MME in 2016.   (more…)
Author Interviews, Electronic Records, Emergency Care / 09.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Shannon Toohey, MD, MAEd Associate Residency Director, Emergency Medicine Assistant Clinical Professor, Emergency Medicine University of California, Irvine Editor-in-Chief Journal of Education and Teaching in Emergency Medicine MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Electronic prescriptions (e-prescriptions) are now the predominant form of prescription used in the US. Concern has been raised that this form of prescription may be more difficult for emergency department (ED) patients to utilize than traditional printed prescriptions, given the unplanned nature of most ED visits at all times of day. While there are disincentives for physicians who choose not to use them, many emergency physicians are still concerned that it could decrease compliance in their patients. This study evaluated prescription compliance in insured patients at a single center. In our studied population, we found that patients were as equally likely to fill paper and e-Prescriptions. (more…)
Author Interviews, Cost of Health Care / 26.04.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Benjamin D. Sommers, MD, PhD Associate Professor of Health Policy & Economics Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health / Brigham & Women's Hospital Boston, MA 02115 and Kosali Simon PhD School of Public and Environmental Affairs Indiana University Bloomington, IN MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Prescription drugs are considered a high value form of medical care, and can be especially difficult for the uninsured to access. The Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion represents an unprecedented expansion of insurance to low-income non-disabled adults, and our study is the first to examine the effects on prescription utilization in detail. (more…)
Annals Internal Medicine, Author Interviews, Hepatitis - Liver Disease, MD Anderson / 17.03.2015

Jagpreet Chhatwal Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Department of Health Services Research Division of Cancer Prevention and Population Sciences The University of Texas MD Anderson Center Houston, TXMedicalResearch.com Interview with: Jagpreet Chhatwal Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Department of Health Services Research Division of Cancer Prevention and Population Sciences The University of Texas MD Anderson Center Houston, TX Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Dr. Chhatwal: More than two million people in the U.S. are infected with Hepatitis C (HCV), a virus found in the liver. In 2012, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force both recommended a one-time hepatitis C screening for baby boomers – people born between the years 1946 and 1964. Last year, the Food and Drug Administration approved the medications sofosbuvir and ledipasvir for Hepatitis C treatment. The newly approved oral regimen comes at a staggering price to payers – as much as $1,125 per day. As a result, several payers have questioned if the price is justified. The study results show that using new therapies is cost-effective in the majority of patients. However, the budget required to treat all eligible patients would be $136 billion over the next five years. Compared with the old drugs, new therapies would cost an additional $65 billion, whereas the cost offsets would be only $16 billion. (more…)
Annals Internal Medicine, Author Interviews, Compliance, Cost of Health Care, McGill, Pharmacology / 09.04.2014

Robyn Tamblyn BScN Msc PhD James McGill Chair Departments of Medicine and Epidemiology and Biostatistics McGill University Scientific Director Institute of Health Services and Policy Research Canadian Institutes of Health Research MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Robyn Tamblyn BScN Msc PhD James McGill Chair Departments of Medicine and Epidemiology and Biostatistics McGill University and Scientific Director Institute of Health Services and Policy Research Canadian Institutes of Health Research MedicalResearch.com: What are the main findings of the study? Dr. Tamblyn: Higher drug costs are associated with a higher probability of primary non-adherence, whereas better follow-up by the prescribing physician, and a policy to provide medication at no cost for the very poor increase the likelihood of adherence (more…)