HIPAA Pharmacy Rules & Patient Prescription PHI

HIPAA eCommerce platforms can leverage patient specific prescription information in order to give a patient the necessary access to purchase — even see information — about an item based on their prescription.

Typically, the best way to handle prescription information with HIPAA eCommerce is to show options but restrict users from actually checking out or adding something to their cart in the e-pharmacy. For them to move forward in the purchasing process, they would need to have the right prescription. From there, the prescription would only unlock the items and categories relating to said prescription.

Essentially, when a patient goes to a HIPAA compliant website and navigates, they can actually categorize or filter the items that require a prescription. There would be a visual indicator, perhaps an icon or a different background shade. It could even be a text indicator. The indicator itself isn’t what matters, but rather that they are notified that the item or items require a prescription.

Legal Validity & Documentation

It’s important to verify that each doctor and their license is still valid to ensure that the prescription is legally sound. There is a process for reviewing prescriptions to make sure that they are not forged. Also, whenever someone uploads a prescription, they will need to sign off indicating that they understand they are proving a legal document. This means they understand the consequences should they provided a forged or intentionally incorrect document or prescription.

Generally speaking, customer support or the prescription group will need to verify which products the prescription applies to and which it does not. For example, let's say a user provides a prescription that falls into a category like prescription lenses and lens details. The HIPAA eCommerce group needs to enable the administrators, customer support, or prescription group to “decorate” the user’s record with more information, noting that this particular user should have access to prescriptions regarding their specific prescription lenses.

The sales portal software would then need to be intelligent enough to understand that the user meets specific criteria for their prescription, and then unlock certain features and items in their searching and filtering capabilities. This could mean they may only have access to a single product, but now they can access different counts of their product, meaning they could purchase monthly or daily contact lenses. Or maybe someone can see the different pill counts available for their prescription. Typically they will be required to renew their prescription after a couple of purchases.