05/01/2022
Thatโs what the independent pharmacies do. Thanks for all the support to ours and other independent pharmacies. Itโs not always about profit for the guy behind the counter - itโs about helping the patients who trust the pharmacist.
Get better care you deserve at Local Pharmacy.
Two things I don't like to do: Take selfies and/or talk about how great our pharmacy is, but this story has to be told because it is not just about our pharmacy, it is about most independent pharmacies across the country.
Today I received an after hours email from a relative of a patient that had just been discharged from the hospital and needed anticoagulant medication asap. When I received the email I was about an hour away in the mountains at our cabin chopping wood. I loaded up and drove the hour back to the pharmacy after sending a quick reply that we would get things taken care of for them.
I could have called one of our pharmacists in to handle this, but they work hard enough during the week and I try not to bother them in their off hours. After hours work falls on the boss' shoulders. That is the part of the burden and honor of leadership.
To make a long story short I was able to get the patient's medication and a granola bar delivered to them in time for their next dose and they were very thankful. I wasn't pretty when I showed up at their door. I looked just like I do in the photo, wearing a hat, t-shirt, unshaved and still wet from my work at the cabin, but we got the job done and the patient taken care of.
The point of this story isn't to brag about how great our pharmacy is. The point is that this type of work is done by independent community pharmacies around the country every single day in communities large and small. Pharmacy benefit managers and mail order pharmacies can never do what we do. Healthcare needs to be local.
As a side note, in case you were wondering, we were paid by the pharmacy benefit manager $12 less than the $500 these three prescriptions cost our pharmacy to acquire from our wholesaler. That $12 loss does not include the time it took to drive back to the pharmacy, the fuel, the bottles and labels, and all of the other overhead required to make sure that this patient got a potentially life saving drug when they needed it. So in reality our financial loss on this service was much greater than just $12.
Obviously, we (and all of the other independent community pharmacies around the country) don't do it for the money. We do it to make a difference in our patients' lives and the communities in which we choose to live. But these payment and anticompetitive issues from pharmacy benefit managers need to be addressed soon. Otherwise, I fear that these types of services will soon disappear.
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