Chip's Discount Drugs, Inc.
Outcome
Chip's Discount Drugs and pharmacist-in-charge Rogers "Chip" Wood Jr. paid up to $2,153,383 civil settlement in March 2020 for filling more than 350,000 illegal prescriptions written by a single physician (Dr. Frank Bynes Jr., later sentenced to 20 years) and being unable to account for 9,000+ oxycodone and hydrocodone pills.
Details
Chip's Discount Drugs, Inc. — $2.1 Million Settlement for Filling 350,000+ Illegal Prescriptions (2020)
Outcome: Chip's Discount Drugs, Inc. and pharmacist-in-charge Rogers "Chip" Wood Jr. of Hazlehurst, Georgia, agreed to pay up to $2,153,383 in civil penalties in a settlement announced March 24, 2020, for routinely ignoring red flags and filling more than 350,000 illegal prescriptions written by Dr. Frank Bynes Jr. over two years, and being unable to account for more than 9,000 oxycodone and hydrocodone pills.
Chip's Discount Drugs was an independent pharmacy in Hazlehurst, Georgia, operated by pharmacist-in-charge Rogers "Chip" Wood Jr. The pharmacy served as a key dispensing outlet for an illegal pill mill operation run by Dr. Frank Bynes Jr. Over the course of approximately two years, the pharmacy filled more than 350,000 illegal prescriptions written by Bynes — a single physician whose prescribing pattern should have been immediately recognizable as non-therapeutic.
The suit alleged that Chip's pharmacy and Wood routinely ignored numerous red flags associated with Bynes's prescriptions, including prescriptions for controlled substance combinations known for abuse potential and prescriptions written without legitimate medical justification. The pharmacy also could not account for more than 9,000 oxycodone and hydrocodone pills as required by the Controlled Substances Act — a significant inventory discrepancy suggesting additional unrecorded diversion.
Dr. Frank Bynes Jr. was separately sentenced to 240 months (20 years) in federal prison in February 2020 on 13 counts of Unlawful Dispensation of Controlled Substances and three counts of Health Care Fraud. The $2,153,383 civil settlement with Chip's was announced in March 2020.
How Crucible Prevents This
Chip's filled over 350,000 prescriptions from a single prescriber over two years — a prescriber concentration so extreme that any distribution analytics would flag it as requiring investigation. Crucible's prescriber-concentration controls, automatically alerting when any single prescriber accounts for an abnormal percentage of a pharmacy's controlled substance volume, would have triggered a mandatory review long before 350,000 prescriptions were filled.
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