Today the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officially rescheduled hydrocodone combination products (HCP) from Schedule III to Schedule II. HCP’s are the most widely used prescription drug product in the United States and I suspect many practitioners (outside of New York where it was already CII) are going to experience issues over the next few months during this transition. I’m asking for physicians, nurses, dentists, pharmacists, and more to please share with me any good or bad situations you experience regarding HCP prescriptions. I’d like to compile them and see if there are any trends or unexpected consequences that we haven’t thought of yet.

We have already discovered that due to IT and other operational constraints that most pharmacies will not honor the refills on HCP’s written before 10/6/2014 even though the DEA will allow the refill until April 2015.

I can imagine that there will be several other issues emerge. If your clinic or pharmacy has implemented a system to streamline the changes, please share as well so we can help encourage best practices around the country. In the end, we want what is best for our patients and to help reduce diversion of this popular drug.