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Post-op discharge medication, delivered to your surgery center.
The discharge is at four. The pharmacy closes at six.
A patient who has just had a knee scope or a lumbar decompression is not going to stand in line at a chain pharmacy on the way home, wait forty minutes for a prior authorization, and then discover the analgesic costs $140. They go home without it. Your office takes the call at nine that night.
Send the order the day before. We meet the patient at the door.
Everything on the discharge instruction sheet — analgesic, antiemetic, muscle relaxant, antibiotic, bowel regimen — filled, labeled, bagged with the patient's name on it, and delivered to your facility timed to the discharge rather than to our convenience. Counselling happens at hand-off or by phone, as it has to.
The failure is invisible and it lands on you.
The prescription that is never filled
Between 22% and 28% of written prescriptions are never taken to a pharmacy at all, and of those that are, a few percent are never collected. A discharge instruction is not treatment until somebody has the bottle in their hand.
The unplanned return
Among Medicare fee-for-service patients 65 and over, 2.5% of ASC orthopedic procedures are followed by an unplanned hospital visit within seven days — and CMS attributes those largely to potentially preventable events, postoperative pain and nausea among them.
The survey now asks about it
OAS CAHPS became mandatory for ambulatory surgery centers in January 2025, with public reporting from 2026. It asks patients directly whether anyone at the facility gave them information about managing pain after the procedure, and a parallel question about nausea.
What we are not claiming
We are not promising this moves your OAS CAHPS score or your seven-day hospital visit rate — no study establishes that a pharmacy delivery program does either, and a vendor promising you a CMS quality outcome is a vendor to be careful with. The evidence for bedside medication delivery is real but narrower than the marketing suggests: two of the largest studies found no significant 30-day readmission effect overall, with benefit concentrated in the orthopedic and spine subgroup, where one community-hospital study found 7.3% re-presentation with the program against 10.2% without. Acceptance, at least, is not in doubt: 97.3% of patients took the medication when it was offered at the bedside.
Two routes, both boring on purpose.
E-prescribe to the pharmacy the way you would to any other. California requires most prescriptions to be issued electronically, with the statutory exceptions, and we are set up to receive them — we are not asking anyone to work around that requirement.
Or fax the order to (323) 653-4079 and call (323) 653-4070 so we know a discharge is attached to it. A fax that arrives with no phone call sits in the queue with everything else; a fax with a call attached moves.
What we need with the order
- Patient name and mobile number — counselling has to reach a person
- The discharge time, even approximately, so the courier is not early or late
- Where it is going — your facility, or the patient's home address
- How it is being paid — insurance, cash, workers' comp, or on the case
- If on a lien: the law firm's name, so we can get the protection letter before the patient is discharged
Controlled substances
Post-operative analgesia frequently means a Schedule II prescription. Nothing about a pending injury case changes any of the rules that attach to it.
- Valid prescription from a DEA-registered prescriber, in the form the law requires
- CURES reviewed before dispensing and every dispensing reported
- Identification verified at hand-off, every time — nothing left unattended
- Quantities as written. We dispense what the prescriber ordered and raise anything that looks wrong with the prescriber, not with the patient
- No stock left at your facility. Leaving pharmacy stock for staff to hand out is either prescriber dispensing or an automated drug delivery system, and both have their own licensing. We deliver labeled, patient-specific prescriptions
- No workaround — if a particular delivery or hand-off is not lawful, we will tell you that instead of finding a way around it
A vendor who never says no to a surgery center is not a vendor you want holding your patients' Schedule II prescriptions.
For the injury patient with no coverage at all.
Plenty of the patients coming through a Southern California orthopedic or spine practice are there on a third-party claim, uninsured, and being treated on a lien by everyone else in the chain already. The pharmacy is usually the one link nobody arranged.
What the facility has to do
Nothing beyond telling us the patient is on a case and giving us the law firm's name. We handle the protection letter with the firm directly. You are not signing anything, not billing anything, and not taking on any exposure for the balance.
What has to be true
The patient must be represented by an attorney, that attorney must sign a letter of protection, and the prescription must come from the treating provider. We do not dispense on a lien without all three — and if a firm will not sign, we tell you before the patient is on the table, not after.