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January Legislative Update

Kelly Vyzral, Director of Goverment Affairs

Happy New Year!

January is the beginning of the 129th General Assembly and there will be a lot of new faces in the legislature. Ohio has one new Senator and five new Representatives in Washington. Here in Ohio, we will have 10 new members of the Ohio Senate and 32 new members of the Ohio House of Representatives. I told you there were a lot of new faces!

I would encourage you to go to the OPA legislative link below and see if one of those new faces represents you. We need everyone to have a good relationship with their member of Congress and member of the state legislature in the next two years. https://associationdatabase.com/aws/OPA/pt/sp/legislative

Electronic Prescribing of Controlled Substances in Ohio

From the November 2010 Ohio State Board of Pharmacy News

Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) published an interim final rule, effective on June 1, 2010, allowing prescribers and pharmacies who wish to engage in the electronic transmission of controlled substance prescriptions (including Schedule II prescriptions) to do so, but only after the prescribing and pharmacy systems can meet the requirements set forth in the rule.

In order to show that the system has met the requirements, each system must undergo an independent (third party) audit by either of the following:
1. a person qualified to conduct a SysTrust, WebTrust, or SAS 70 audit;
2. a Certified Information System Auditor who performs compliance audits as a regular ongoing business activity.

As the Board understands, many of the major financial auditing firms are able to offer the required audits. One important note to make is that it is not the responsibility of the individual prescriber or pharmacy to obtain this audit. It is the responsibility of the e-prescribing system vendor and the pharmacy system vendor to have an audit conducted. Once it is conducted, the system vendors are responsible for notifying their clients. The bottom line is this – until you receive notice that your pharmacy computer system has successfully completed the DEA required audit, you may not accept electronically transmitted controlled substance prescriptions, even if the prescribing system has been successfully audited.

At the time of the writing of this article, no prescribing system and no pharmacy system had undergone a successful audit.

Therefore, there should be no electronic controlled substance prescriptions being transmitted or accepted.

If you have any questions or comments about the issues mentioned in this article, please contact Kelly Vyzral, Director of Government Affairs, at 614.586.1497 or kvyzral@ohiopharmacists.org.

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