office phone: no longer available
fax for record requests: (425) 689-0073

Sammamish Diabetes and Lipid Clinic, PLLC
A medical home for patients with cardiovascular risk. 
3854 E Lake Sammamish Parkway NE, Sammamish WA 98074 .

Prescriptions

  • Prescriptions for chronic. long-term medications  on stable patients are generally written with refills for a year.  If you are near the end of a prescription that has no refills, it probably means that it is time for an office visit. Other possibilities might include:

    1. Your pharmacy made an error in transcribing the number of refills for your prescription.  You can call the pharmacy and ask them to check the original prescription
    2. Your prescription was for a medication that can not legally be refilled for more than a limited period of time, such as a sleeping pill, testosterone, or a tranquillizer. You should make an appointment for a visit to update your status and get a new prescription.
    3. Your prescription was not intended by the prescriber to be a chronic, long-term medication, and you should make an appointment to discuss what to do next.  An example might be if a patient was given a short course of steroids for an acute inflammatory condition.
    4. A blood test or follow-up visit might be prudent or appropriate.  An example might be a medication for cholesterol, blood pressure, or arthritis which the standard of care requires blood tests and visits to be done every 3 or 6 months. 

  • If you are not sure whether you have remaining refills on a prescription, please call your pharmacy. The pharmacy can either give you your refill or else fax or electronically request a refill for you. If you are due for a follow-up visit, we generally will refill only enough medication to last until the visit.

  • If you have a refills of a medication authorized for a period of time and then you switch to a mail-order pharmacy that sends medications 90 days at at time, we will rewrite your prescription for 90-day refills to last until your regular prescription would have expired. It is not true or appropriate that mail-order prescriptions need to be refilled for a year at a time. They only need to be refilled until the patient is due to be seen next.

  • If you change insurances or prescription plans and find that some of your regular medications are no longer covered by your new insurance plan, the best thing to do would be to schedule a visit to discuss your options. Changing medications may well require additional testing and more frequent follow-up. For example, changing from one blood pressure medication to another, even in the same chemical class, may result in totally different results.

 

  • Costs of prescription medications are an issue, and it is not unusual for health insurance to require a co-pays that is higher than the actual cash price of a medication.  Also, the cash price of a medication may vary widely from one pharmacy to the next.  I suggest that patients check at GoodRx.com for comparison shopping and money-saving coupons before trusting that their health insurance will give them the best deal.