GLOSSARY · PRESCRIPTIONS
Dispensing vs. prescribing, who writes it and who fills it.
Dispensing vs. prescribing is a legal distinction that separates the clinician who decides a patient should take a drug from the pharmacy that prepares and delivers it.
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What it means
Prescribing is a clinical act: a licensed provider evaluates the patient and authorizes a specific drug, dose, and quantity. Dispensing is a pharmacy act: a licensed pharmacy checks the prescription, prepares and labels the medication, and ships or hands it to the patient. The prescriber must be licensed where the patient is located, and the pharmacy must be licensed in the state it ships into.
Some states let physicians dispense from their own practice, with limits. Most telehealth programs keep the two roles separate and send every prescription to a pharmacy.
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Why it matters to a brand operator
The line between the two is where money can bend medicine. When one company earns a margin on dispensing and also influences prescribing, it has a financial reason to prefer certain drugs, doses, and refill schedules. Regulators watch for that, and so do state laws against kickbacks and fee-splitting.
For a brand, the practical question is who earns what at the dispensing step. A platform that marks up medication earns more when the dose goes up or a refill ships sooner. Asking for the wholesale invoice next to the billed price shows exactly where the margin sits.
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How Tessic Health handles it
On Tessic Health, the prescriber picks the medication and the pharmacy fills it at wholesale with 0% markup, so no one upstream earns more if the dose goes up.
See the published termsRELATED TERMS
Words that come up next.
E-prescribing
E-prescribing is a prescribing method that sends a prescription from the provider's software to the pharmacy over a secure network, replacing paper, phone, and fax.
Formulary
A formulary is a list of medications that a health plan covers or that a clinic's providers prescribe, along with the doses, forms, and prices that apply.
503A compounding
503A compounding is a type of pharmacy compounding that lets a state-licensed pharmacy make a custom medication for one specific patient, based on that patient's prescription.