The agency has ordered all the companies to send such advisories to prescribing doctors.
Another proposal was to require prescribing doctors to have admitting privileges at hospitals within an hour of their offices.
The letter also says blanket prescription of Malarone malaria pills occurs, "without the prescribing doctors ever seeing their patients".
But consumers don't see these highlighted alerts, and patients are rarely informed of the risks by prescribing doctors.
I've uncovered so many mistakes in consultations with patients that I begin to wonder what prescribing doctors and nurses actually do.
Even many critics concede that patients' privacy is apparently not an issue, because the tracking systems identify only the prescribing doctors, not patients.
But New York State officials are still looking at these "physician based models," Mr. Munoz said, to determine whether there were any inappropriate connections between the prescribing doctors at the clinics and the pharmacy's bottom line.
Prescribing doctors, who must submit forms to the State Department of Health about patients who received the medication, said all who died cited "loss of autonomy" as a reason for seeking it.
