Rx surveillance: Watch out for prescribing over the Internet

State authorities, particularly California, are cracking down on physicians who prescribe online without having examined their virtual patients.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. Oct. 22/29, 2001.

Pssst! Are you prescribing online without seeing patients? Well, watch out. Last month, a California investigator began surfing the Internet full time, looking to nail physicians who prescribe drugs without ever meeting the "patients."

The goal is to enforce an Internet prescribing law passed earlier this year requiring doctors to examine patients or have a valid physician-patient relationship before they can legally dispense drugs online, said David Thornton, the California Medical Board's chief of enforcement.

While the electronic enforcement effort squarely targets physicians and unlicensed prescribers in California, that doesn't mean regulators will ignore out-of-state physicians caught illegally prescribing drugs to Californians. The board will forward the names of those physicians to the state and federal authorities that have jurisdiction over them, Thornton said.

"We don't know the extent of the problem, but we view it as a serious problem. That's one of the reasons we've assigned somebody full time" to investigate Internet prescribing, he said.

Others are concerned, too. Since the late 1990s, 19 states have enacted Internet prescribing laws or policies, and others are considering doing so. But only California has assigned someone to investigate Internet prescribing on a full-time basis, according to some observers. At least so far.

"I don't know of any other medical board that has either designated or created a position to focus only on Internet prescribing," said Dale Austin, interim CEO of the Federation of State Medical Boards of the United States. [...]