<p>Hello all,</p>
<p>I will be a freshman this year at a college that is far from home. I am on prescription medicine and I clearly cannot pick it up from home while I am at school and I cannot pick it up from school while I am home. Should I have my prescription on file in both places? I was wondering if anyone could tell me how they (or their children) have dealt with similar prescription issues in the past. </p>
<p>Thank you!</p>
<p>If you use a chain pharmacy like CVS or Walgreens, it’s quite likely that you can just tell the pharmacy to have the prescription at a different location. Otherwise, you’d probably need to ask your doctor to divide your refills among two separate prescriptions.</p>
<p>Our insurance had an awesome mail order option. We signed up with that and had prescriptions mailed to the college address when the kid were at school, and to home when they were home.</p>
<p>Another option would be to use a national chain… Target, Walgreens, CVS all have stores in tons of locations.</p>
<p>My daughter uses Walgreens. She can pick up Rx at either home or school locations & my prescription insurance debit card is on file both places for the co-pay. It has worked w/o a hitch. She orders on-line and the Rx is prepared at the location of her choice.</p>
<p>It’s come in handy when she’s forgotten an Rx and is somewhere other than home or school She can get a partial refill at any Walgreens to tide her over til she gets back.</p>
<p>CVS is pretty far from campus, but that is what I currently use. If my insurance has the mail order option I will likely opt for that, if not, I can just divide my refills I guess! Thank you so much!</p>
<p>Walgreens works great for this. When you do your refill online you tell them what location you want to pick it up at. The pickup location can be any Walgreens in the US.You can also have your parent credit card set up already for auto payment and that way you don’t have to worry about having your own credit card or cash to pay for the prescription.
CVS did not work out as well for us. At least at the time we looked into it they did not seem to have their computer databases linked.</p>
<p>Another great thing about mail order is that they will often fill the prescription for 90 days’ worth of medication, whereas you can typically only get 30 days at a walk-in pharmacy.</p>
<p>Regardless of how you ultimately decide to handle your prescriptions, make sure you head for college with a copy of the insurance card and the prescription card. If you are covered under your parents plan they can probably go on line and order extra cards for you. Even with a prescription “on file” you should have those cards with you at college.</p>
<p>S1 is a type I diabetic and has many prescription to fill and lives 1500 miles away from us. We use Target. We can pick his stuff up at the Target down the block or he can pick it up at the Target in California. They will comunicate with each other and with us and him very well. He actually gets a 3 month supply so only has to make the trek every so often. </p>
<p>Ditto momofthreeboys; make sure you have copies of your presciptions and insurance cards (my wife made a file folder of important papers for our S beofre he left).</p>
<p>Take your pill bottle and your health-insurance prescription card to any pharmacy near campus. This pharmacy can contact the pharmacy that last filled your prescription and verify how many refills you have remaining on that prescription. If you have refills remaining, the new pharmacy will transfer the prescription there. If you do not have refills remaining, the pharmacy can contact your doctor for a new prescription.</p>
<p>This system should work fine unless the medication you take is a controlled substance under the Controlled Substances Act. (This includes most ADD or ADHD medications.) If that’s the case, you may be required to submit an original paper prescription each time, and you doctor may not be allowed to write a prescription that allows for refills. If that’s the case, you’ll have to have a doctor–either your doctor from home or a doctor at or near your college–write you a new prescription every time you need medicine. If this is the case, you can call your insurance company to find out how much medicine they will cover for you on a single prescription. (It’s probably 90 days.) The pharmacy, however, should be willing to fill a prescription written by a licensed doctor in another state.</p>
<p>What you have here isn’t a serious problem. It’s just a situation that’s new to you, so you don’t know how to handle it. But your doctor, and the pharmacies near your college, and lots and lots of adults have done this kind of thing before. When you get to college, take your pill bottle to any pharmacy on or near campus. Ask the pharmacist what it will take for you to be able to get your medicine while you’re at school. **Do this right away. Do not wait until you are out of medicine.<a href=“It%20may%20be%20the%20case%20that%20you%20will%20need%20time%20to%20get%20a%20paper%20prescription%20for%20a%20controlled%20substance,%20or%20that%20the%20pharmacy%20does%20not%20normally%20stock%20the%20medicine%20you’re%20taking,%20and%20will%20need%20a%20day%20or%20two%20to%20get%20some%20in.”>/B</a> I expect you’ll be pleasantly surprised how simple it turns out to be.</p>
<p>If it’s not something you need too frequently, have your parents pick it up and use it as an excuse to send you monthly care packages. :)</p>
<p>Your campus health center <em>may</em> also have a pharmacy, although most do not.</p>
<p>^ we do sometimes pick up some stuff for S (ex; test strips) and my wife regularly sends care packages and puts stuff in but not everything can be sent thru the mail, including many prescription drugs, so be careful and check before sending anything thru the mail.</p>
<p>Mail order is OK if you live on campus.</p>
<p>But if you live off campus – or when you are at home – it may not be a good idea. It is not good for some drugs to sit all day in an extremely hot or extremely cold curbside mailbox.</p>
<p>Ditto the advice from Mom60 and others here. Our kids were able to pick up their prescriptions at the Walgreens less than 5 minutes from their school. For the big chains, usually, once a prescription is entered into their database, it can be filled at any store. We called the Walgreens close to our kid’s school to ask a couple of questions, and took the most recently written prescriptions into the Walgreens near school. OUr physicians was able to call in refills from her Georgia office as well. The other things to check is whether your family has their medication co-pays on an “auto-pay” mechanism. We have that set up through our Walgreens and it applied to any medication refills our kids used while at school. Made budgeting expenses much easier! Good luck and congrats for thinking the “dailiness of life” through before you get to campus.!</p>
<p>We have not found this a problem either - prescriptions are called in, picked up at the local CVS, student just pays the $10 co-pay with our credit card.</p>