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Prescribing therapeutics: fulfilling your role as a primary eye care provider
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It started out as a rather simple concept. Expand optometry’s scope of practice and optometrists will be better able to serve their patients’ needs. Over the past 3 decades optometry has done just that. Through expanded educational curriculum, tireless lobbying efforts and state-by-state legislative initiatives, we now have the privilege of prescribing medicines for our patients’ ophthalmic needs.
While the ability to write prescriptions does not define our profession, it is essential in our role as primary eye care providers. Surely, if patients, insurers and the health care community are to recognize optometry as a primary eye care provider, we must embrace this privilege. And herein lies the challenge.
Educational process important
Every bit as important as securing our therapeutic prescribing privileges has been the educational process. Educating patients about optometry’s expanded scope of practice. Educating primary care physicians, pediatricians and other health care providers regarding our role as primary eye care providers. And educating optometrists concerning the implementation of therapeutic agents.
By and large these efforts have been fairly successful. In fact, if you ask optometrists if they’re actively utilizing their therapeutic privileges, the answer is almost uniformly an emphatic yes.
However, from a broader perspective, it hasn’t been that easy to get a handle on optometry’s prescribing habits. For a variety of reasons it’s been almost impossible to measure just how well optometry has adopted this facet of practice. For starters, prescription tracking services have traditionally used DEA numbers, a technique that “misses” a fair number of optometry prescriptions. Then there’s the issue of multispecialty practices in which the optometrist issues scripts on their ophthalmology colleague’s pad. Finally, there’s the “generosity factor” — the tendency of optometrists to treat with professional samples.
Situation improving
The good news is that things are indeed changing. Prescription tracking services have developed more accurate ways to monitor optometry’s prescribing habits, and optometrists are using professional samples more judiciously as well as taking “ownership” of their scripts. (See "Research firm works to credit ODs for prescriptions they write.”) In fact, the number of therapeutic scripts written by optometrists in 2001 was more than 50% higher than that in 1997. A sizeable increase by any measure.
In the final analysis, this isn’t a contest. It isn’t about writing prescriptions for the sake of writing prescriptions. It is all about assessing how well optometry has fulfilled its role as a primary eye care provider and how well we are serving the public. And if the numbers are any indication, we are certainly providing more of what our patients need.