SASKATOON, Sask. — For Saskatoon pharmacist Evan Froc, work was slowly returning to normal late Tuesday morning after a daylong scramble caused by a provincewide outage of the Saskatchewan Provincial Drug Plan software pharmacies use to issue, renew and bill for prescriptions.
Froc estimated to SaskToday that his Medicine Shoppe location on Acadia Drive had to turn away 100 to 120 patients Monday due to the issue, though staff were able to process several transactions toward the end of the day.
“Yesterday, not that the workload was filling all those prescriptions, but the workload was communicating to all those patients, where we're at in terms of the billing and the drug plan,” Froc told SaskToday, citing efforts both prior to and after the resolution.
“And then this morning it's basically a duplication of those communications. Basically a twofold backlog. So yeah, extra staff, extra time, overtime, that type of stuff to get things done.”
Froc said he and his staff first learned of the issue early Monday morning. He added he suspects it was an unplanned outage due to the lack of advance notice.
“It sounds like it was a kind of a maintenance thing over the weekend that they were working on that didn't go so hot,” said Froc, who also commended his patients’ patience and the IT staff who worked to fix the issue as quickly as they did.
More precisely, Froc said his understanding was that the outage prevented pharmacies from processing anything through the drug plan software, which in turn meant “we can’t really figure out what a co-pay would be for a patient.”
A co-pay is a predefined percentage or dollar amount patients with benefits packages pay for medications or services.
That also meant out-of-province patients may not have noticed the same impact as residents of Saskatchewan.
Beyond a day of possible inconvenience, Froc said some patients with more intensive needs, such as those who have been prescribed controlled substances, may have been impacted further.
“For a lot of controlled substances, those controlled substances have intervals on them, and those intervals are set by those patients’ prescriptions,” he explained. “And for example if you’re a narcotic pain management medication, we have to abide by the interval that’s put on there by the physician.
“And so some people, call it 30 every 30 days, well if yesterday was your 30th day and we can’t process your transaction it makes it significantly challenging to get those patients the medications that they need on the days they need them.”
The provincial NDP held a press conference Tuesday morning in Saskatoon, with associate shadow health minister Keith Jorgenson calling on the Saskatchewan Health Authority and the provincial government for public answers as to the cause of and response to the situation.
