North Carolina News: Item 2192 - Clinical Pharmacist Practitioner Prescriptions for Controlled Substances

October 1, 2009 4:22 pm Topics: Controlled substances and Prescriptions

Reprinted from the October 2009 North Carolina Board of Pharmacy Newsletter.

Board staff occasionally are asked about the legitimacy of prescriptions for controlled substances written by a clinical pharmacist practitioner (CPP). There are typically two questions asked:

1. May a clinical pharmacist practitioner write for controlled substances?

Yes, so long as such orders are included within the scope of the CPP’s practice agreement with the supervising physician. A CPP, like any other practitioner, must have a valid Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) number to prescribe controlled substances.

2. May a clinical pharmacist practitioner use a hospital’s DEA number to write for controlled substances?

Yes, so long as the use of the hospital’s DEA number satisfies DEA Rule 1301.22. That rule says that an “individual practitioner who is an agent or employee of a hospital . . . may, when acting in the normal course of business or employment . . . prescribe controlled substances under the registration of the hospital” under certain circumstances. Those circumstances include the prescribing being “done in the usual course of his/her professional practice,” the prescriber “acting only within the scope of his or her employment in the hospital,” and the hospital designating “a specific internal code number for each individual practitioner so authorized.” The rule specifies that the internal code number “shall consist of numbers, letters, or a combination thereof and shall be a suffix to the institution’s DEA registration number, preceded by a hyphen (eg, APO123456-10 or APO123456-A12).”