"Our study shows that clarifying missing information from prescriptions is a time-consuming and expensive task for pharmacists," said Rose Mary J. Madejski, clinical assistant professor of pharmacy at UB who conducted the study.

Madejski noted that the problem also creates a cost for the physicians who fail to provide the information, since staff in their office must take the time to obtain the correct information and relay it to the pharmacist before he can fill the prescription.

The objective of the study, presented at the annual meeting of the American Pharmaceutical Association, was to examine what it costs pharmacies each time they have to contact a physician's office for additional information in order to correctly fill a prescription.

"It cost each pharmacy in the study $117 per week to obtain the additional information, which during a year amounts to $6,084," explained Madejski. "Profit margins for pharmacies are so tight that $6,000 a year for clarifying prescriptions is a costly sum," he said.

The study looked at 36 pharmacies over a period of one week. During that week, they filled a total of more than 47,000 prescriptions, of which 1,532, or about 3.2 percent, had missing information.

Contacting physicians' offices to clarify and add the missing information required a total of 127.6 hours of pharmacists' time for the 36 pharmacies.

Madejski estimated that each time a pharmacist made such a call, it cost about $2.75 in pharmacist salary and telephone fees.

A major problem identified by the survey was that on 23 percent of the prescriptions written for controlled substances-medications with a high potential for abuse-the physician had not indicated the maximum daily dose of the medication that was not to be exceeded.