Pharmacy Delivery Systems

One of the major complications for the elderly in being compliant with their medications is the fact that many of them cannot drive to the pharmacy to actually receive their medications in the first place. Especially during the winter months when they're concerned with driving in general, they sometimes will just decide that they would rather not take their medications because they don't want to drive. Many elderly patients have family members who can stop by the pharmacy for them and deliver their medications, but many do not. For those that who don't have anyone to come get their medications, or who have had their license taken away, they often feel hopeless like they don't have a way to take their medications, when this is not the case.

Many pharmacies are implementing systems that allow medications to be taken to patients-whether they're patients with disabilities or just patients who would rather have their medications delivered to them. Depending on the prescription volume of the pharmacy the pharmacy will either hire a delivery service to come to their pharmacy and deliver the medications to the patients, or one of the technicians will take their medications to them. At our pharmacy we have one of the technicians deliver medications to not only different nursing home style facilities, elderly patients at their apartments, but also to ACT, the testing station. Many of the patients at ACT have busy schedules and so our pharmacy has came up with a system to deliver their medications to them. All of the patients from ACT have charge cards that they have kept on file with us, and every week we go through the books and on either Tuesday or Thursday we deliver to these patients. Along with charging these medications to their cards, we have to make sure that we remove all of their patient information from the outside of the packages so that we don't violate HIPAA. Along with this we have to have a general signature slide that the main boss at ACT signs allowing their medications to be distributed.

When we deliver to different places such as WestBranch facilities, we have to ring a buzzer to be let into the home, and then the nurses either take the medications from us, or we take their medications to their room. So this way many elderly patients are taking their medications and not skipping doses, increasing compliance and decreasing their chance for having polypharmacy and increased adverse reactions and unwanted side effects. The problem is, many of these patients are unaware that having their medications delivered to them is even an option. Pharmacies need to make sure that they are advertising their delivery services sot hat these patients don't think that they are hopeless, this will not only help the patients but help the service of the pharmacy.