Effective July 2013, Georgia laws and Georgia State Board of Pharmacy Rules require that all Schedule II controlled substance prescriptions issued by a prescriber be written or printed on security paper that meets the requirements of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Interested parties may want to review Official Code of Georgia Annotated §§26-4-5 and 26-4-80.1.

Since October 2008, CMS (which includes Georgia Medicaid) has required that all prescribers must use tamper-resistant (security paper) prescription pads for any new prescription that was initially filled on or after April 1, 2008. This requirement includes that all handwritten and/or electronically generated and printed prescriptions for fee-for-service Medicaid patients contain at least one industry-recognized feature from each of the three categories of tamper resistance.

Those categories are:

  1. one or more features designed to prevent unauthorized copying of a completed or blank prescription form;
  2. one or more features designed to prevent the erasure or modification of information written on the prescription by the prescriber;
  3. one or more features designed to prevent the use of counterfeit prescription forms.

Pursuant to Georgia State Board of Pharmacy Rule 480-27-.02, all electronically generated drug orders presented to a patient by a practitioner, regardless of whether or not the patient is a CMS patient, must be printed on security paper, and must contain either an electronically reproduced visual image signature of the practitioner with the wording that indicates the signature was electronically generated or the original signature of the practitioner. For more information, interested parties should review Rule 480-27-.01 and Rule 480-27-.02(4).