Retail and community pharmacies are changing | Out-Of-Pocket

It’s an exciting moment in healthcare to rethink the roles community pharmacies and pharmacists play - I’m here for it. The only way we’re going to lower the cost of care is by making care more physically accessible, increasing touch points with patients, and triaging care to the most cost-effective form of labor.

I think pharmacies can position themselves as escalation hubs, especially as home diagnostics and virtual care become more prevalent and the scope of practice expands for pharmacists.

Instead, the role of pharmacists will likely need to shift to focus on the human facing side of things and areas that are more cognitive which pharmacists don’t have time to do today. This has included everything from counseling patients on their medications, interfacing with physicians on how medications fit into the care plan, diving deeper into ... See more

We need to shift more tasks pharmacists do (e.g. visual inspection, looking up data, dispensing, etc.) to software/machines, which might actually perform equally as well.

Pharmacists are an underutilized part of the clinical staff, and unlike primary care physicians there’s actually no shortage of pharmacists. Historically, their role has been focused on the dispensing of prescriptions.

More than 90% of the population lives within 5 miles of a pharmacy. There are about 327K pharmacists in the US and 486K total primary care providers (internal medicine, family medicine, pediatrics, etc.). Medicare beneficiaries, who are more likely to be on a recurring medication, see the pharmacist twice as often as their primary care physician. T... See more