When it comes to local specialty pharmacies, service is beating out big business.
Many seniors who are tired of the long lines and feeling ignored by the staff have found confidence in their local specialty pharmacy.
Too often we saw during COVID chain pharmacies using the pandemic as an excuse to underperform and provide less.
Local Specialty Pharmacies Are Gaining Popularity In the Central Valley Following Covid
Some local pharmacies have stepped up by being a specialty pharmacy, offering free home delivery, and providing medication blister packs.
Here we will discuss what these are and why believe these services have helped the local specialty pharmacies grow in the Central Valley.
Table of Contents[Hide][Show]
What Is A Local Specialty Pharmacy?
Specialty pharmacies focus on medications for rare or complicated diseases. These medications are often expensive both for the pharmacy and for customers. Since these conditions are rare, few people in a city will be needing refills for them. Hence, most regular pharmacies generally choose not to carry them in stock.
Specialty pharmacies generally help people with these conditions:
- Crohn’s Disease
- Hepatitis C Virus
- HIV
- Hypercholesterolemia
- Multiple Sclerosis
- Oncology
- Osteoporosis
- Psoriasis
- Rheumatoid Arthritis
- Ulcerative Colitis
It’s very common for specialty pharmacies to provide compounding services too.
Compounding is when a pharmacy is able to create custom mixtures and formulations of medications that are not standardly produced by the manufacturer.
For example turning a pain pill into a cream that can be rubbed onto the skin.
You can imagine now with slow supply chains, manufacturing being stopped overseas, and new rules creating confusion, how a pharmacy choosing to provide support for special cases could win out.
Specialty Pharmacy Compounding Capabilities
Many large manufacturers do have specialty and compounding capabilities but they often only do it through their national mail order option.
If you require a specialty pharmacy you may want personal support when navigating dosage, insurance, and administration of your medications.
When you have a local pharmacy that is managing your specialty medications you can get help without being on hold forever.
If you need an emergency refill, you do not need to wait for it to be mailed out. It could be available the same or next day.
Speaking of Insurance. As we mentioned earlier, these specialty medications can be very expensive.
Because of this insurance coverage can often fall short or leave the patient with a huge share of the cost. Most specialty medications are either not covered or are a tier 5 with most Medicare drug coverage.
A tier 5 means you would pay 33% of the cost for the drug.
A patient of ours had a medication for Valley Fever that cost $15,000 a month. His share with insurance would be $5,000 a month.
Robert Loyd – Local Medicare Agent
Thankfully, another cool feature of these specialty pharmacies is they help patients negotiate with the manufacturer and the insurance to save you money. In this instance they were able to work with the insurance and the manufacturer so our patient only paid $100 a month for his medication. Huge difference!
There is a peace of mind knowing the pharmacy is working for you.
Many feel the large chain stores lack the personal touch. The local pharmacy is motivated to help keep you as a customer and in turn will do a little more for you to keep you happy. For this reason we have grown fond of local specialty pharmacies.
Local Specialty Pharmacies Offer Free Prescription Delivery Services
It’s still surprising that free home medication local specialty pharmacy delivery hasn’t caught on everywhere yet.
Especially post COVID, we see how valuable it has become for seniors. Those in senior apartments and 55+ living facilities have been locked down and greatly discouraged to leave home.
Many who rely on family are having issues as their family struggles to navigate new schedules with work and school.
Some pharmacies offer to deliver medications for a small fee.
For this reason many ask if Medicare or any insurance cover medication deliver. The answer is no.
Medication Blister Packs Make It Easier To Organize Your Pills
Pill organizers are now officially old news.
The new thing beginning to emerge is blister packaging for medications. This is when pharmacies essentially bubble pack medications by dose.
They can package each medication individually in a blister pack or grouped together by time of day they are taken.
This makes taking medications easy by having your pharmacist organize all of your medications for you. All you have to do is pop them out and take them.
Blister packaging isn’t covered by insurance for the same reasons medication delivery isn’t.
Yet, I don’t believe we’ve ever seen a pharmacy charge for it.
The issue is usually that a pharmacy just doesn’t offer it. This is because it requires the pharmacy to make a large investment into the machine to do it.
Outside of Amazon, we really haven’t seen many pharmacies use this technology. Hence, why we chose to work with the local pharmacies following the link.
Each and every one of them offer this service for free to all of their clients.
The benefit to using the local specialty pharmacy is that if you get a new medication before your next refills or if you have any issues, the local pharmacy can clean it up and get anything you need delivered the same or next day.
On some level a pharmacy is a pharmacy. If they can fill you medications and they’re covered by your insurance then they work. Now, it’s when things go wrong or when special circumstances arise when you want more out of your pharmacy.
This is usually when the convenience of mail order pharmacies runs out and you can only talk with someone in another state over the phone and have to wait to get your meds delivered again.
For these reasons we really like what these local pharmacies are offering.
- Local service and support
- Free Medication Delivery
- Free Blister packaging for all medications
If you would like to be contacted by one of these local pharmacies and see if they’re a good fit for you, click the button below and one of them will contact you within 72 hours to answer any questions and help transfer your medications to them.
Are Incontinence Supplies For Seniors Covered by Medicare?