2019 Session Recap: Emails to DVMs from the Pharmacy Board

TVMA has received a lot of questions about a series of emails that have recently been sent out by either the Texas State Board of Pharmacy (TSBP) or a related vendor.

To assist you in understanding these messages, you should know that during the 2017 Texas legislative session, veterinarians were specifically exempted from reporting into and checking the Texas Prescription Monitoring Program (PMP). However, legislation did pass that required TSBP to automatically register all practitioners (including veterinarians) for a user account. The Texas Board of Veterinary Medical Examiners (TBVME) was required by the same statute to provide the email address they have on file for each DVM to TSBP for the purposes of automatic PMP registration.

If you have recently received a message from either the Texas State Board of Pharmacy or its PMP vendor, it is probably for one of the following two reasons:

1. You or a member of your staff has ordered Schedule 2 Official Prescription Forms and additional verification is required to process your order. If you do not provide this information, your order will not be filled. This is especially true if you have never ordered forms in the past or rarely use the forms. Due to the high illicit street value of prescription forms, TSBP has received an extremely large number of fraudulent orders and must take measures to verify the legitimacy of each order. If a staff member ordered the forms, the board may try to ensure that the DVM authorized the order. As a result, orders are backed up by many months.
2. The state-selected PMP vendor (PMP Aware) is periodically sending out emails to encourage practitioners to sign up for the PMP program because one of the statutory deadlines that requires physicians to create an account is approaching (unless one of the pending bills to back up that deadline passes in the next month). The system does not distinguish between types of practitioners and all may be receiving this email.

Currently, legislation has not yet passed to require veterinarians to participate in the PMP, and TVMA has been working with legislators on this issue to find other solutions to combat drug diversion and the opioid epidemic that are not disruptive to veterinary practice like mandated look-up/reporting into the PMP would be. Veterinarians may choose to finish creating their accounts in the PMP system. Due to the number of fraudulent prescription orders, it’s probably a very good idea for veterinarians to go ahead and create PMP accounts. This will allow veterinarians to periodically access their own prescription histories to make sure no one has issued unauthorized prescriptions under their DEA number.

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