Bill would help patients to sync up prescriptions

PROVIDENCE – State Sen. Roger A. Picard (D-Dist. 20, Woonsocket, Cumberland) has introduced legislation that would require health insurers to give more subscribers an annual opportunity to synchronize the refill dates on their prescriptions.

Currently, state law requires insurers to sync-up refill dates only for patients suffering from chronic diseases. Senator Picard’s legislation aims to extend the opportunity to all patients.

The legislation is particularly aimed at helping older residents manage their medications more easily and save them from having to make frequent trips to pharmacy.

“It’s not at all unusual for an elderly person to have four or five medications, each with a different refill date,” said Picard. “Most insurances limit how early you can refill them, so the result is a lot of trips to the store, and a lot of dates to remember. Especially for people who don’t drive, or who have to rely on someone else to pick up their prescriptions, that’s a pretty significant hassle.”

Allowing people to synchronize refill dates would be more convenient and make prescription management simpler caregivers as well as patients, Picard said.

Senate Bill 2018-2131 calls for health coverage that allows each subscriber with multiple prescriptions at least one opportunity per year to synchronize all of them by partially filling some, thereby allowing the refill dates to match up. The bill requires co-pays or other cost-sharing mechanisms

s to be pro-rated based on the percentage of the prescription that is filled. Picard said he got the idea from a similar law that recently passed in Florida, -

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and it made him think about people like his mother, who have to juggle a complicated schedule of prescription refills.

“This is a relatively small change that would simplify many people’s lives,” he said. “It would also make it less likely that someone would run out of their medication because they forgot to refill

St. Martin said DOT has recognized the need for traffic-flow improvements at the intersection for some time, owing mainly to the heavy use of the artery. He said about 18,000 motor vehicles a day travel across Mendon Road and another 7,800 use the crossroad – Diamond Hill.

“It’s been in design for a while,” he said. “We’ve been working with the city and we were able to finally program it into our 10-year plan.”

Workers from National Grid have already been at the site to plan for the removal and replacement of utility poles, but construction workers aren’t expected to arrive for about two months.

Dunkin’ Donuts will lose a triangular patch of grass consisting of roughly 350 square feet in front of the coffee shop to accommodate the new lane, according to Public Works Director Steve D’Agostino. The owner of the franchise, Neal Faulkner, planned for the loss when he built the shop several years ago, erecting his signs far enough away from the road so they won’t have to be moved when the new lane is built.

Faulkner’s parking lot will be unaffected.

But D’Agostino couldn’t say the same will be true for motorists using Mendon and Diamond Hill roads during the construction project, which is expected to last until June 30, 2019.

The short-term prognosis for drivers passing through while work is ongoing boils down to one word for the public works director. “Inconvenience,” he said. The intensity of the travel head- aches will vary, D’Agostino said, but it’s likely the job will require sporadic lane closures and detours. He does not expect work crews to be doing much during the less-traveled nighttime hours, because the job would have been more costly to bid that way.

But Baldelli-Hunt said that when the improvements are done, the area will be more conducive to travel and commerce at Walnut Hill Plaza and Woonsocket Plaza, the two main shopping centers on Diamond Hill Road. Still the city’s busiest retail area, Diamond Hill Road has been steadily percolating back to life since the down years that followed the exit of Walmart in 2011.

Recently, Ocean State Job Lot announced that it had purchased the vacant department store, filling one of the last of the remaining big box holes on Diamond Hill Road. Baldelli-Hunt said Job Lot is expected to begin remodeling the old Walmart shortly as it prepares to relocate its Walnut Hill Plaza store to the site. The company is also expected to announce within a couple of months that it has a tenant for a portion of the building that it will not be using.

“We’re going from two lanes to three, it’s going to keep traffic flowing better, and the signals will be changed to match up with the new lanes,” she said. “There were a lot of folks who were looking for this to finally come to fruition, and they’re going to be happy to see this, too.”