There has been a large surge of walk in clinics, on site work clinics and emergent care centers to take the load off
of overwhelmed hospitals. There are extended hour pediatric centers opening up to help working parents who don’t have time for normal physician hours. Once you have finally gotten a prescription after sitting in the ER for hours or finally gotten in to see the Doctor at a walk in clinic, you are still facing a large obsticle…where do you get your medication filled?
Twenty years ago the big box chain pharmacies were prepping for a
They used to advertise “the most 24 Hour stores in the country”. In the early 2000’s, they started to pull back…things got tight. They began to reduce the expansion rate and hold the line. Insurance reimbursements became huge negotiation battles and Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBM’s) came on the scene and took a large percent of the profit in the market. The chain pharmacies saw the way the industry was headed and started to withdraw. Drug inventories at the stores were reduced and you might have noticed how they never had the full amount of your prescription in stock, now you had to make 2 trips to the drugstore.
When that wasn’t enough, they thought outside the box and started to force you to call ahead for your refills so they could automate and centralize the whole process. That led to a staff reduction at each store. So now you have
All the while, keeping the 24 Hour signage outside, but just the convenience store part…NOT the pharmacy department. This can be extremely frustrating to a patient in need of medication and