Legal?

[ejsmom]

Hello everyone!

Is it "legal" to take a med order via fax? There is an MD at my facility that will not under any circumstances give us a telephone order, and we hardly see him for a verbal one. To keep the peace, management is going along w/ him for now. I would hate this to be a new trend.

Thoughts?

[kstec, LPN]

Do you mean he just faxes the order to you? If so, yes as far as I know it's legal. A lot of doctors only communicate via the fax. I work LTC and at a clinic and we get a lot of request for orders via fax at the doctors office and the doctor just okays it and I fax it back. Also at the LTC facility if a doctor does not come to the facility and agrees to keep the patient while in LTC, we just fax orders to him for him to okay and sign and fax back. It's actually nice because he sign your order or writes his own which is nice in regards to us (nurses) taking the telephone order incorrectly.

[Nascar nurse, ASN, RN]

As far as I know, this is perfectly legal with some great benefits of preventing transcription/communication errors.

But, (and every area of the country is different), our state surveyors will not accept US faxing the Dr. with info - such as labs- because we have no way to prove that the Dr. actually got the info. We must call this into their office, but we can accept info from them.

[Dolce, RN]

Happens all the time in LTC and hospital settings too. I prefer a faxed order over a verbal or telephone one because it is already signed by the doc and there is much less chance of making an error. Saves time too.

[txspadequeenRN, BSN, RN]

i would much rather have a faxed order than a verbal!!!

[CapeCodMermaid, RN]

Yes, faxed orders are legal and beneficial too. You have time to think about what you want to ask for. The doc has time to think before agreeing with what you want. The order is signed.

We also had a problem when it came to faxing labs. Just because you stick the paper in the machine does not mean the doc got it. I had several nurses who would fax abnormal labs at 2 am. Is THEIR doctor in his office at 2am?? Mine's not! So we would write on the lab slip MD notified see new order or no new order or whatever. They would also write a nurses' note to say the doctor was informed blah blah blah. We got cited one year on a DPH survey so we were extremely careful after that.

[fultzymom]

In LTC at my facility, we deal with faxed orders all the time. We have a problem with a patient, we fax it over, they fax back. We get the labs, review them, then fax over the labs with all the pertinent meds attached for that lab. We also fax with questions that we have. For the most part, if we call to talk to the doc's nurse, we go into the whole problem/situation/lab et the nurse in the office will tell us to "fax it over, please."

Leslie