This setup is crazy, as someone from another country.
Why don't you have a unified system for the pharmacies and doctors to tap into?
In my country, if I get a prescription it goes into my card. Then any pharmacy can read the card, see what prescriptions are yet not used, and provide the product (which marks the prescription as covered). Recurring products, like allergy medication or chronic illnesses, become automatically available again after a certain time, like a cooldown. You only need doctor intervention during the original diagnosis and prescription, or after rare issues (like needing an extra prescription because you lost the meds).
I'd have thought this system or a very similar one is universal.
We used to! Doctor would write prescription on a pad, and you could take the script to any pharmacy.
Of course, doctor penmanship is terrible, and we're going paperless, so we've got to digitize. And every doctor's office and every pharmacy has their own system, and sometimes they can talk (but I think there's a lot of faxing behind the scenes)
Of course, you can't know what drugs will be covered, so the doctor has to guess, and if they guess wrong, the pharamacist will want to check with the doctor to see if something else is OK to save you money, but nobody can be reached, ever.
Why don't you have a unified system for the pharmacies and doctors to tap into?
In my country, if I get a prescription it goes into my card. Then any pharmacy can read the card, see what prescriptions are yet not used, and provide the product (which marks the prescription as covered). Recurring products, like allergy medication or chronic illnesses, become automatically available again after a certain time, like a cooldown. You only need doctor intervention during the original diagnosis and prescription, or after rare issues (like needing an extra prescription because you lost the meds).
I'd have thought this system or a very similar one is universal.