Mail Service Pharmacy CSCD 8 - Scope of Telephone Services

This standard specificies the minimum available telephonic services required under CSCD 6. Those minimum services should include consumer information about drug and drug therapy, prescriber information about the appeals process, staff capacity to receive and return calls, and a mechanism to not only receive complaints from consumers and providers but also to escalate certain calls to clinicians when appropriate.

The standard puts the meat on CSCD 6's requirement of telephone services for providers, pharmacies, and consumers by requiring specific information to be provided through those services.  There also is a consumer safety component here in that the organization must demonstrate a capability to escalate troubles to a clinician where necessary.

Documentation for the desktop review is, as usual, a combination of a P&P and evidence of implementation of the P&P.  Evidence might be a sample of a call log demonstrating that the organization tracks these various kinds of calls and the resolution of those calls.

We recommend that the tracking log be able to distinguish among the various types of calls described in this standard so that the organization can track and trend issues separately within each category.

This standard will be covered in the portion of the onsite review during which the reviewer sits with one or two of the customer service representatives and listens in on calls.  The reviewer also will look at current call logs and perhaps even records showing how calls selected from those logs were handled.