OXFORD, Miss. – Current technology has given community pharmacies a unique opportunity to reinvent the way they do business, and an Oct. 19 workshop is set to show Mississippi pharmacists a system that can change their traditional model.
“Community pharmacy is at a crossroads,” said Benjamin F. Banahan, director of the Center for Pharmaceutical Marketing and Management at the University of Mississippi School of Pharmacy. “We need to move community pharmacy from the traditional model of dispensing product to a patient-care model.”
RxSync®, a system that helps patients better manage their medication therapies, is helping local pharmacies do just that. The system synchronizes and schedules prescription refills, which eliminates multiple visits to the pharmacy each month and the need to call in refills before they run out. This enables pharmacists to spend more time interacting with patients, and allows them to provide services such as medication therapy management.
Banahan and Erin R. Holmes, assistant professor of pharmacy administration, developed the service by conducting four years of research and collaborating with Stanley Devine, owner of Pharmnet in Winona, who initially employed a similar business model.
“We are so excited to have a system in pharmacy where everybody wins,” Holmes said. “We’ve had testimonial after testimonial of pharmacies that have experienced dramatic, inspirational transition with RxSync.”
An informational workshop on RxSync is scheduled for Oct. 19 in the Ainsworth Conference Room at the School of Pharmacy building in Jackson. The workshop, which begins at 8 a.m., provides 6.5 hours of continuing education credit.
RxSync is being used in multiple pharmacies across the Southeast. Oxford Family Pharmacy began using the system five months ago.
“We have customers who get eight prescriptions per month, and it’s nice to have them filled all on the same day,” said Adam Baskerville, pharmacist at Oxford Family Pharmacy. “We have about 12 patients on RxSync as of now, and we are adding to that. It’s really helpful at the beginning of the month, because we already know what prescriptions need to be filled.”
Maintaining patient adherence is one of the goals of the RxSync system. The service creates a schedule of monthly patient monitoring, where phone calls are made in advance requesting information for refills.
Bob Lomenick, owner of Tyson Drug Co. in Holly Springs, is a strong advocate of RxSync. He has been using the business model for four years and has some 100 patients enrolled in the program.
“By using this model, you are taking the chaos out of pharmacy,” Lomenick said. “You are taking your pharmacy from a reactive mode to a proactive mode. It’s a completely different way of doing pharmacy, and definitely a positive change.”
For more information about the RxSync workshop, contact Robert Dozier at 888-957-0007 or rh.dozier@mipa.ms.