Posts

Showing posts from October, 2009
In the olden days if a Mafioso ratted on somebody he'd get thrown off a bridge or tossed off a rowboat wearing cement shoes. Nowadays nobody's ratting on nobody. And why's that? Because the new mafia has made it darn near impossible to rat anybody out, just because it's all so stinking complicated that hardly anybody knows what's really going on. But the end game is still the same: kill any bugger that gets in your way or costs you money. When somebody gets killed every half hour in this country you'd think it might just get noticed. Nah. First you'd have to know the links, how it all fits together. And with a body on the floor who's going to notice the dozen different things that caused it to happen in the first place? Nobody, that's who. Here, I'll give you an example. Say Johnny Walnuts starts to notice his crew isn't taking in nearly as much as it did last year. So he ups his premiums, say. Things start to look better, but not as much as
If the pharmacy industry can finally solve the riddle of how to serve a patient's need for personal consultation (now vastly underserved) while demanding more and more of the pharmacist's time, then we will enter the next stage of medication management. As I wrote earlier, robot dispensing of medications holds great promise to free up the pharmacist to actually do what he/she is trained for: medication management (known in the biz as MTM, short for Medication Therapy Management ), inoculations, and training patients to better manage their disease states. It is amazing that students spend six years in training for disease and medication management but when introduced to the business world none of what the newly graduated can offer is actually used. Can pharmacists reduce the costs of health care by catching provider errors? Yes. Can pharmacists reduce hospitalizations, and emergency room use through Medication Therapy Management, increasing adherence to medication use? Yes, agai
I've been wondering lately if retail pharmacy is dead or at least ready for some major triage. It's not that the local pharmacy is going to go the way of the dinosaur. Pharmacies will never disappear. But I do think they are going to evolve into a different "animal" than what we see on the corner now. I say that because of the different circumstances faced by the retail druggist than existed even just five years ago. In January of 2006 millions of elderly Americans began prescription coverage with Medicare Part D. This was not only a boon for seniors; it brought increased foot traffic into drug stores. The volume of prescriptions filled sky-rocketed. Then a couple of years later Wal*Mart brought its own brand of insurance reform by instituting their list of $4 medications. In an industry not known for creativity this was an earthquake high on the Richter scale of business practices. It brought price point back to prescription drugs, competition where none had existed