Medical Center Hospital recently opened a retail pharmacy at 319 Golder Ave.
Opened in October, it serves discharged patients, those who need patient assistance and regular customers. Hours are 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. seven days a week. The phone number is (432) 640-6333.
The hospital did have a pharmacy previously from around 1997 to 2010, but it only served hospital employees, Director of Pharmacy Erica Wilson said.
“Even before the retail pharmacy, we had a little pharmacy inside of the main pharmacy that helped with indigent care, so a lot of patient assistance for the community,” Assistant Pharmacy Director Tony Li said.
“We used our residents and a couple of other staff members. They squeezed the time to make that work. … We had a little area near the front of the entrance where we would dispense this meds, do counseling and all that stuff. It was a very small patient assistance program based on the fact that we didn’t have a lot of labor or people to handle it,” Li added.
When they started thinking about a retail pharmacy, it was a three-pronged approach — helping the community, doing patient assistance and having another pharmacy for the employees where it’s convenient.
It also helps lower employee drug costs because the hospital is using its own labor to dispense medications, “rather than somebody like CVS and Walgreens who charges us for that labor,” Li said.
“That was the second piece. The third focus is … to make sure that the patients are coming out of the hospital are better taken care of because we have better communication between our pharmacy and the inside of our hospital than CVS or Walgreens or any other commercial pharmacy would,” he added.
Wilson said the HEB pharmacy that was in the Wheatley Stewart Medical Pavilion closed in September right before the retail pharmacy opened in October.
The MCH pharmacy has seven full-time employees
Li has been assistant pharmacy director for a year, but has worked at MCH for three years, including two as a pharmacy resident. He started his current role just before the retail pharmacy opened.
“It was kind of the previous director and (my) little project that we got going,” Li said.
Wilson started as a pharmacy resident in 2015 and has had multiple roles before becoming pharmacy director in August 2022.
Li said a lot of the retail pharmacy’s customer base is built in because a good proportion hospital employees use it.
“Then we already had a lot of those indigent care (patients) from the previous program. Those guys obviously stayed with us as well. And the other part that comes with us fairly easily would be the people who are admitted into the hospital, or go to the emergency room and they’re getting their medications upon discharge. Some of those stay with us and some of them will go to their regular pharmacy because it’s more convenient afterwards. The three populations that we see a lot are the people that come from the hospital and then get their discharge medications and stay with us. The people who are our employees where it’s convenient for them to get the medications when they’re going to and from work. And then the people who we do the indigent and patient assistance programs because we offer, I would think, the largest patient assistance around this area,” Li said.
Drug manufacturers have patient assistance with different criteria.
“It takes the care coordination here and our patient assistance tech to navigate and help the patients with that. But we also have a program where we pay a monthly fee, essentially, and they’ll offer us certain medications that are very commonly used that are cheap generics. We can offer those for free for people who meet their criteria —criteria of the manufacturers, criteria of this program, and then we have an in-hospital program for patients are getting discharged because we don’t want them to be readmitted and to suffer complications, so we also offer help in that sense, which has its own specific criteria for how that works, which is why we need a patient assistance tech to kind of manage the complexity of the program. But there are multiple ways that we help indigent patients,” Li added.
Wilson noted that the in-patient pharmacy and the retail pharmacy function independently.
“… It does feel like we’re able to take care of our patients better because we have it from our inpatient and just that direct link to the outpatient,” Wilson said.
Li said the pharmacy is removing barriers and restrictions to patients whether they are employees, indigent or discharged patients.
“… As you can tell, it’s easier for us to work closely together between our main pharmacy and the hospital and our hospital-owned retail pharmacy. Commercial pharmacies with pharmacists that are hired for CVS (or) Walgreens, they’re following policies and procedures that are made by Walgreens and CVS and they’re very restricted in what they are allowed to do. If a patient is needing something and … they can’t pay for the price of the medications it’s very difficult for them to help those patients. With us, that is not the case,” Li said.
Wilson said they have told the doctors that the pharmacy cares about the same things they do because they are all part of the hospital.
“We care about readmissions, length of stay, quality of care and safety of care because our hospital cares about that …,” Wilson said.
For hospital employees there is a locker where employees can request a prescription be filled and it is left in a secure locker. The team confirms that they are willing to authorize payment over the payment or from a previous transaction.
“Then our staff goes and delivers it to these lockers and then you get a text message as the employee saying hey it’s ready in the locker, scan this QR code or enter this code into the locker system,” Wilson said.
One of the reasons MCH did this was to increase convenience for the staff and for overnight employees.
“It’s 24/7 the locker system is open,” Wilson said.
