Dear patients of Renfrew Medical Group,
A reminder regarding prescription renewal requests:
In Ontario, prescription renewal requests are not covered by OHIP. While many services are covered by OHIP, services that are not are called uninsured services. A prescription renewal request is one of these services. Other examples include insurance forms and sick notes.
We do ask for every appointment you have that you bring in your medications so that we can review what requires renewal at your appointment. This allows us to determine if you require any testing or monitoring for your medication you are on. It also allows us to ensure your medication list is correct and up to date as sometimes specialists or other physicians may add, take away or adjust your medications.
If you do not have an upcoming appointment and you notice your prescription has zero refills left, typically this gives you 30-90 days, depending on the prescription, to call the office to book an appointment for a prescription renewal.
Please note when a prescription request comes in without an appointment, our office scans this and enters it to your chart, which then creates a task in our medical records. The physician then checks your chart to ensure you have had the appropriate monitoring for this medication, checks to see if any new medications have been started that may interfere with this medicine, and checks to ensure the medication dose has not changed or that the medication has been stopped by another physician. Often patients are called for follow up in response to these requests to clarify one of these above issues.
After all of this we then send the prescription back to your pharmacy. None of this is an insured service we can bill OHIP for. The Ontario Medical Association recommends a $25 fee for this service.
If you do not wish to pay for this service, please call the office to book an appointment. We would be happy to see you to renew your medications.
Up until recently we have not been consistently charging for the service, however as of July 1 it will be necessary for us to do so given the volume of requests we are receiving.
Sincerely,
Dr. Arcand, Dr. Clouthier, Dr. Langlois, Dr. Wang and Dr. Varrin