“Hey this is CVS, we have your prescription ready”
[Go to CVS]
“Oh, we received the prescription from your doctor but it isn’t filled yet. Can we fill it now? No, come back in 2 hours.”
I don’t understand how it can possibly take 2 hours to count a couple dozen pills, throw them in an orange tube, and slap a label on it. Maybe a pharmacy tech can enlighten me here.
Probably because they’re counting pills and throwing them in bottles for a lot of other people, too.
All the other people who have ordered meds before you. Also where you told a two hour wait time in person? That’s a little suspect if it’s not a huge order. I worked a very busy pharmacy, and if you are waiting in store we rarely had to ask more than a half hour. In fact a half hour is rare, but a rush when we are short handed…
But if you call ahead or order online, that yea you are just in the line of a few hundred people who needs rxs filled.
My CVS went through a period at one time where even in person prescription, they would ask me to come back later to pick it up. CVS treats its employees like trash, but apparently customers got mad enough that they finally hired some more people because that hasn’t happened in a while.
I have worked in a CVS so I can answer this first hand. The main reason is every CVS is critically understaffed to the point of danger to patients.
Beyond that systemic problem that adds delay, actually dispensing the prescription is not the rate limiting step. When you get a prescription there’s a whole list of things you need to do before it can be dispensed. In no particular order:
- Select the right drug which seems easy but the prescriber may have used an old brand name, or misspelled it, or put in something that doesn’t exist.
- Calculate days supply (easy for pills, not so much for insulin, creams, eye drops, etc.)
- Find the correct doctor in the system
- Find the right patient’s profile and see if they really fill at your store
- Transcribe the directions in a way that makes sense in less than ~200 characters to fit on the bottle.
- Check to see if the patient already has another prescription on file they are in the middle of the refills for so you don’t have two active prescriptions.
- Check to see the prescription has all the required information on it to be filled based on state requirements
- Send the finalized prescription to the patient’s insurance which inevitably is rejected because of some minor issue with any of the above, or it is expired, or requires prior authorization, or they changed their name, or it is too soon, or it’s not the proper moon phase.
- Actually fill the prescription which requires finding it on the shelf which is a mess because you fill ~500 prescriptions a day
- Scan the bottle to make sure it’s the same as what you billed the insurance, but if you picked the wrong generic brand on the first step you get to start over.
- Clean the counting tray
- Count the pills
- Get the right vial and label everything with the stickers, and if you need more you need to print more out but someone else has a 50 page print job ahead of you and it’s out of labels
- Answer the phone
- Answer the drive through
- Answer the patient at consultation
- Answer the patient at the cash register
- Send it to the pharmacist for review which is a huge process on it’s own which requires looking for interactions, appropriate dosage, correct drug for the disease indication, and simply reviewing you got everything transcribed correctly which if it isn’t you get to start all over. Plus there are 50-100 prescriptions already waiting for review.
- Process a vaccination patient
- Add water to a reconstitutable (powder) medication
- If Poseidon wills it, the prescription is approved and then you get to bag it, then put it in the right spot in the bins so it can be found.
If it’s a controlled substance you need the pharmacist to do about 50% of the steps above and access the safe which is a whole process. In the meantime they are on the phone with a doctor or some insurance trying to get something clarified or approved. Or compounding someone’s diaper cream. Or doing vaccinations. Or counseling someone on their antibiotic. Some drugs have mandatory monitoring programs you have to enter information from the doctor before they can be dispensed. Some drugs require a dosage syringe, or intramuscular syringes, or needle tips.
Suffice it to to say it is an involved process.
Wow, that is a lot more manual work than I expected. You have to rewrite the directions too? I imagined the prescribing doctor would do that, then all you have to do is look up the order on the computer and print out the label.
Thank you for the explanation, the whole process seems like it could be made more efficient.
Because the world doesn’t revolve around you and there are other people as well.
My pharmacy does this too. Also this: Receive a text that medication is ready. Go to pharmacy. “Sorry, it isn’t ready yet. Come back in half an hour.”
Why did you tell me it’s ready when it wasn’t ready?!?
This just sounds like a manager has a metric of “all prescriptions must be ready in x minutes” and it is easier for the pharmacist to just click “it’s ready” before the alarm goes off.
Happened a few times in China “hey this is your delivery man. Sorry, I clicked the button to reach my quota but I’m still on my way. I’ll be here in a few minutes though, don’t freak out ok?” Never would dream of complaining, they are so good.
Or the opposite. “We’ve received your prescription from your doctor but you didn’t ask us to fill it so we didn’t.” I hate CVS.
I really love my local pharmacy. The time it takes to drive from my rheumatologist to the pharmacy, they’d have my script ready.
Or they try to refill prescriptions that aren’t supposed to be. I got a call from them saying they had contacted my doctor and she wouldn’t let them refill my short term antibiotics, so I should call and fix that so they can give me more that I don’t need.
What is CVS?
I’ve never used CVS before. Can someone explain?
I call in a refill on my prescription. It takes them 4 years to fill it. Then they text me every five seconds for the next three days until I pick it up, threatening to throw it into the fires of Mordor if I forget.
Thanks for the explanation. This was really confusing, because here we just go to any pharmacy and get our medicine.
You can get your prescription from any pharmacy, but you can only send a prescription to one pharmacy at a time. So if you choose the local CVS and they are taking a long time to fill it, you have to transfer the prescription to another pharmacy (even if it is just a different CVS store).
Are you saying that if you have a prescription, you can go to any pharmacy without pre-arranging anything, and they will give it to you? Are all pharmacies linked to a central system so they all know your prescriptions available and whether they’ve been filled?