Refrigerator Prank

Now THIS is a scary trick to play on mom...

Happy Valentine's Day

May your day be filled with chocolate...

and Klingon Cards:

How to Get What You Want...

...by embarrassing the pharmacist.

Austin, Texas, has an MD named William E. Jones. I don't know anything about him except from what is written on his website. I think that Dr. Jones must have dealt with a bad pharmacist or two in his day based on his attitude toward refills.

From: Dr. Jone's Website:

Frequently Asked Questions:

How do I refill my prescriptions if your office is closed?

     When you call your pharmacy for refills (as above), the pharmacist is required to obtain authorization for the refill from my office.    If our office is closed for a few days (while we're on vacation or if I'm away at a medical meeting), the answering machine will give the pharmacist the name and phone number of the doctor covering for me who will gladly authorize your refill.   

     Sometimes, though, if the pharmacist is rushed (or just lazy), rather than call the covering doctor, they'll just give up.    Sometimes pharmacies simply send us a fax requesting a refill authorization; and if they don't receive a return fax from us (because our office is closed), they just give up without ever phoning our office at all.   Then, when you show up to pick up your prescription you'll be told something like, "We couldn't reach the doctor" or "Your doctor's office wouldn't authorize the refill" rather than the truth, "We didn't try very hard to get this authorized."   The best way for you to handle that situation (during normal office hours) is to:

1. Ask to borrow the pharmacist's phone
2. Call our office to get the number of the covering doctor
3. Call the covering doctor's office
4. Then hand the phone to the pharmacist

     If you embarrass the pharmacist once like that, the problem probably won't happen again with your prescriptions (at least not with that particular pharmacist).

Basically what Dr. Jones suggests is that if you, the patient, judges that the pharmacist didn't follow Dr. Jones' procedure to get a refill from their office to go ahead and "embarrass" the pharmacist by following the steps above.

I pulled up Dr. Jones' address from his website and searched for pharmacies in the area. I actually made a few phone calls and asked a few questions to whoever answered the phone. Apparently there really have been no issues with the people I talked to, so why the attitude? I have no idea.

This attitude gives patients the idea that if we don't have their refill ready we're lazy misfits. After working in pharmacy several years and going out of my way to get refills for patients, "lazy" is the last word I would ever use to describe our attempts to obtain a refill.

Dr. Jones, I would really encourage you to visit some of the busy pharmacies in your area and actually see what's going on there. You may be able to provide a personalized service that your patients appreciate, but you simply can't expect every pharmacist everywhere to call you personally for every refill request. That's just not reality, dude.

Further, your instructions are a poor example of professionalism in our healthcare industry. You may think you're setting some standard that meets your personal criteria but all you're really doing is pissing off the pharmacists in your area -- the good people that check YOUR prescriptions and dispense medications to YOUR patients. That is the reality, dude.

More comments from The Cynical Pharmacist HERE.

Cell Phone Rudeness

It's after 6pm. The last tech has left. I'm alone now until closing time. These are the bewitching hours of pharmacy.

Lonnie Megaquart comes by to pick up medication for his wife. He's a regular of ours and mostly a pretty nice guy.

But not today.

"The doctor said he was going to call in some Loovaquin for my wife. We were just at the doctor's office 30 minutes ago."

In addition to knowing the names of all brands and their generics, we pharmacists have had to learn all the patient names for medications as well. Loovaquin?

"I'm sorry, Lonnie. He hasn't called yet."

"I was just there 30 minutes ago. He said he would call right away and you'd have them ready for me when I go here."

"No one has called, Lonnie." 

I do the usual run around the pharmacy. 

"I have no faxes, voicemails, or e-scripts. I will still need time to fill it and the doctor shouldn't be telling you when I'll have things ready. He or she doesn't know my present workload."

"Well I'm going to give him a call. This is an outrage."

Lonnie steps aside and pulls out his cell phone. Another pharmacy patron steps up to the window and I start checking him out. I hear Lonnie talking to the doctor, then say to me,

"Here's the doctor. He wants to call in the prescription..."

Lonnie is standing right next to the person I'm presently helping, leaning over the counter with his hand outstretched, trying to hand me his phone.

I look at Lonnie, then at the man I'm helping. I'm flabbergasted. Seriously, WHAT on EARTH is WRONG with these people?

As polite as I can, I say, "Lonnie, have the doctor call me here at the pharmacy in a few minutes. I'm helping this man right now."

The phone starts ringing. We have a distinctive ring for doctors. It's the most annoying sound in the world. I'm still helping the other guy at the window and it takes several rings before I get to the phone.

"Goofmart Pharmacy, this is Crazy RxMan."

"This is Doctor Bigass. What took you so long to answer the phone?! I need to call in a prescription for Levaquin for a patient that is waiting at your pharmacy right now!"

Seriously? I don't make this stuff up. And now I have two more names to add to my notebook.

Comments on How to Really Piss off your Pharmacist

Recently there have been some comments on one of my earlier blog posts, How to Really Piss off Your Pharmacist. 

The negative comments are interesting. Here's one:

"You seem to left out the fact that YOU chose this profession, so stop whining. You do work for US...the customer! We don't particually like dealing with you either. Most pharmacists these days are rude and condensending..just like YOU are in this article! We get sick, have to wait WHILE we're sick and become sicker when you are rude and force YOUR crappy generics on us that YOU get kickbacks on.You Find the cheapest supplier, dole out the useless generics and insist the are exactly the same as brand drugs. OK, sure they are." [sic]

There are further comments (check this LINK if you want to read them) defending pharmacists, but my point with today's blog post is that as pharmacists we really do have a long, long road to overcome in terms of some patient perception. Obviously this person really thinks that we "force" generics on patients and get "kickbacks" for doing so. I checked my mail just yesterday and my kickback check still isn't there, unfortunately. As far as "forcing" generics, any pharmacist will tell you what a joke that statement represents.

The long road is why hundreds of pharmacists and pharmacy technicians read blog posts like this one -- because they understand. They live with nonsense every day. There's a huge disconnect between how a pharmacy really operates and how the patient thinks it happens, otherwise we wouldn't make these statements or identify with them. 

Pharmacists are generally viewed as ethical, trustworthy people. Obviously we still have some people who have some unusual issues, but with time we'll overcome that too.

Interacting with the Customer

Another email arrived from The Authorities. To summarize several long paragraphs: 

Another great year... yada yada yada... our "opportunities" are profitability. Costs of meds are up, reimbursements remain the same, we have no control over cost and reimbursement, so we (read that YOU, PHARMACIST) needs to minimize costs to increase productivity. The only thing we CAN control is inventory and labor. Inventory is good but we can't do anything about labor (then why do they constantly play around with tech hours?). Sooooo... YOU, PHARAMACIST, YOU need to concentrate on INTERACTION with the front store customers to drive volume and thereby increase profitability.

YOU, PHARMACIST, YOU need to offer to take our customers to items on the floor and engage in conversation, talk to them about "one stop shopping" and ASK them for their pharmacy business!

What it amounts to is this... Corporate has determined that there are a ton of people who shop at the store but get their prescriptions elsewhere. And this is Corporate's brilliant answer to increasing profit: Drive sales by having pharmacists run all over the store begging for business. 

Last year The Authorities used a direct marketing campaign. They mailed $30 transfer coupons directly to this specific demographic -- people who shop in the store but don't get prescriptions here. Yeah, we did some transfers and handed out a lot of gift cards. Transfers add a tremendous burden to the pharmacy workload, but we did it. And as you guessed already, most of those people transferred back out to their regular pharmacy in 30 days. An expensive and complete defeat was handed to someone in upper management over that one, I'm sure.

I don't have all the answers. If I did I'd be incredibly rich and sitting on the beach right now in Hawaii getting a tan. But I do know this:

* We've been here for several years. The competitors close by us have been here for several years. The customer base has been consistently the same for several years. Whatever drives people to Goofmart Pharmacy, Wagmart, or SVC pharmacy is likely a consistent factor as well. People are largely driven by force of habit. Most of our NEW business comes when Wagmart really pisses someone off or we have something the other two pharmacies don't have. 

* We have plenty to do. We have prescriptions to fill and are always fighting for our technician hours. Just a few weeks ago The Authorities cut our technician hours by 10%. I reminded our regional manager that Corporate did the same thing last year and a week later after that our volume went way, way up. We were hit pretty hard that week last year. Corporate was not convinced. What happened? This year a week after they cut the tech hours we set a new record in number of scripts. Even after that it still took another two weeks for Corporate to restore the technician hours. My point? We're busy. We don't have time to be running around the store drumming up business like carnival barkers.

* We're pharmacists and technicians, not marketing specialists, salesman, or carnival barkers. When I took this job at Goofmart, I signed on to provide pharmacy healthcare to patients. I've worked in sales. I'm not a salesman. I hate sales. MOREOVER, this is a profession. We're professionals. Corporate had their noses bloodied with last year's failed campaign so now they're trying to add to the burden of pharmacists. Let's see... Quake-N-Zap, Medication Therapy Management, Immunizations, Insurance Specialists, Loss Prevention... all ON TOP of filling prescriptions accurately and quickly while dealing with all the regular insanity... and NOW you want us to run a sideshow too?

I Force you to Laugh on Sunday