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Friday, March 1, 2013

A la Carte

I think...Retail Pharmacy needs to just admit we are Money Hungry Whores (MHW). I have decided, rather than fight it, to just embrace our new role. Let's rename all our chains (MHW RX).
First...I want to start with an a la carte menu. The one that they have at the Chinese restaurants with the tasty pictures. But...I want it to be fine print. I want it to look like the old NYSE boards where the numbers flip. I want every insurance copay for every drug in an alphabetical list on this screen. We can even put tickers in the waiting rooms and at the front door. And on the building's facade. This way, whenever anyone wants the price, we can tell them it is posted and while they are waiting for us to fill their prescriptions, they can locate the price. Maybe it will show up faster than we can process it. It's a race! 
I would also include our services: Flu Shots, Zostavax, Pez Dispenser (for the just-gimme-a-few crowd), where the price fluctuates daily or hourly depending on staffing conditions. If you want it at noon on Monday-$60 for the flu shot. If you wait until 7pm Thursday, $15. 
We'll create an app that will allow you to scroll through these. It will link all the pharmacies in the state to a central database. It will be like the DisneyWorld app. You can see where the wait times are the longest or shortest and go there based on how valuable your time is instead of worrying about the pharmacy's "rather arbitrary" wait time of 30 minutes. 
Customer service is the future. Professionalism is overrated. Our collective companies' motto is "We don't care about your health. We care about your wealth." Everything our "profession" has done to improve customer (note-not patient) service and compliance has been about more money. I say let's run with it. Let's all sit down with APhA, our other scattered local, state, and national organizations and tell them the corporations have won. Stop fighting it. 

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