From a Specialty Pharmacy Liaison – I spoke with a new patient immediately after an appointment last month. She was frustrated and needed help to manage multiple medications between several specialty pharmacies and a local retail pharmacy. During her most recent clinic visit, she was placed on a new preventative regimen, and she was having difficulty working with her pharmacy providers to structure her new medication routine. She takes several generic medications in addition to those she takes to manage her chronic conditions, so juggling multiple medications from different pharmacies was something she had been trying to fix for a while.
Complicating the issues even further, she is on state Medicaid and each month struggles to come up with the $50 in medication copayments to cover all of her medications. After explaining this to me, I told her that the hospital specialty pharmacy could consolidate all of her specialty and non-specialty medications into one place. We would be able to waive her copays as part of the non-profit hospital’s policy. This came as a huge relief!
Adding to her urgency, she planned to fly out of state soon after our call to attend to a family matter, so our timing to coordinate her new medications and payment structure was short. I told her the travel wouldn’t be an issue and that if I needed her for anything, I would reach out to her. As soon as we hung up, I started organizing all of her medication transfers and got new prescriptions from her multiple specialty providers so that we could begin to set up her medication shipment.
Thankfully we were able to sync up all of her medications to go out on the next delivery. She could have everything all at once, just as she hoped. As we finished up our call, she couldn’t stop talking about how amazing her life would be now that her care and medications were truly coordinated between hospital clinics and the hospital specialty pharmacy.
She said that people get so accustomed to a routine as a society that we’re all jaded toward customer service because the promise is usually so far from the reality. So much so that we don’t even know what “good” customer service is like anymore. Then she started getting emotional about how great we’ve been for her and how easy we’ve made her life. She said, “we exemplify what excellent customer service is.”