The neighborhood drug store returns to downtown Pawtucket
Blackstone Pharmacy offers free delivery, home visits and free bubble packs
Gary Kishfy of Blackstone Pharmacy has brought the concept of a neighborhood drug store back to downtown Pawtucket.
That 20 percent-and-growing figure mirrors the 20 percent number that Dr. G. Alan Kurose, president and CEO of Coastal Medical, has calculated for drugs as part of his medical group’s costs.
If Rhode Island seeks to lower the rise in medical costs, which drives the rise in health insurance premiums, there needs to be more attention focused on ways to reduce pharmacy costs.
Independent neighborhood pharmacies – and in-house hospital pharmacies – both address the cost issue for customers.
Should the R.I. Office of the Health Insurance Commissioner be charged with creating standards and benchmarks for the costs of prescription drugs, rather than leaving it in the hands of medical providers, insurers and large pharmacy chains?
Who controls the distribution channels of these new personalized drugs will certainly be a problem unless there are some thought given to how to ensure access to both the haves and the have-nots.
PAWTUCKET – At the corner of “neighborhood,” “lower cost” and “free delivery,” Blackstone Pharmacy has just opened its second store on East Avenue right across from Blackstone Valley Community Health Care center.
Owned and managed by pharmacist Gary Kishfy, the independent Blackstone Pharmacy offers an antidote to the proliferation of big chain pharmacies such as CVS Caremark, Walgreens and Rite Aid in Rhode Island, carving out a niche market that’s based on high-quality customer service.
“We are a throwback to the old-time neighborhood pharmacy,” Kishfy told ConvergenceRI. “We know our patients by name, we know their families. We’ve cultivated a staff that is bilingual – so we make every customer who comes in here very comfortable, whether they speak Portuguese, Creole or Spanish.”
Kishfy, a 1985 graduate of the University of Rhode Island’s College of Pharmacy, had worked for years with a number of the big chains, carefully storing up ideas about the kind of pharmacy he wanted to run.
In 2008, he opened his first store, at 465 Lonsdale Ave. in Pawtucket, in a hodge-podge of a small but busy shopping center.
“With the chain environment, it’s a high-volume situation,” Kishfy said. “You don’t get that one-on-one personal touch with the customers. We know our patients; they’re not just numbers. It’s that personal touch, that connection with our neighbors and with the community.”
And, it’s also being able to offer his customer free delivery and lower prices for their prescriptions, Kishfy continued. Unlike the big chain drug stores, Kishfy said that Blackstone Pharmacy was not about “selling paper towels and things like that. It’s about better serving the patient’s needs.”
Kishfy said he works with patients on pricing to make the medications more affordable. “Because we are an independent pharmacy, there’s no red tape, we can help the patient with pricing. We’re always much less expensive than the chains, and we always want to work with the patient to make sure that they can afford it,” he said.
Free delivery, lower costs make a difference
Blackstone Valley also offers a host of services that the big chains do not, such as free delivery and same day delivery, every day of the week.
“We offer a free service of multiple bubble packaging of prescriptions,” Kishfy continued. “We’ll put together complicated regiments of medication in a bubble pack, so that the patient can punch out a bubble each day and take the right amount he or she needs.”
For an elderly customer, the bubble pack helps to make it easier to take medication, it improves compliance, it keeps them more independent – and out of hospitals, according to Kishfy.
The new partnership with Blackstone Valley Community Health Care is a win-win situation for the pharmacy and the community health center, according to Kishfy.
Through a federally subsidized program, Kishy’s pharmacy is able to provide members of the community health center with prescriptions at a lower cost, making it more affordable for them to get their medication. The arrangement helps both the underinsured and the uninsured, improving the health of the community.
Looking ahead, Kishy doesn’t anticipate expanding beyond the two stores any time soon. “I’d rather stay smaller and provide better service, versus getting larger and not have as much good service,” he said.
Other end of the spectrum
On the other side of spectrum, Lifespan, the state’s largest hospital network opened its own pharmacy, called Lifespan Pharmacy, on May 1 as part of the Rhode Island Hospital complex.
When asked about the volume of patients now using the new pharmacy, Christine Collins, the director of Pharmacy for Rhode Island, The Miriam and Bradley hospitals, said: “We're still in the early stages of opening and we wanted to give our staff time to fine tune our process before we started any significant promoting of our services.”
To date, Collins reports that feedback from patients, physicians and health care professionals “has been exceptionally positive.”
In terms of cost reductions for patients, Collins said that Lifespan Pharmacy’s prices were very competitive with other retail drug stores. “Several customers, both patients and employees, have already expressed that they were pleasantly surprised by our prices,” she said. “If patients want to continue using Lifespan Pharmacy after they are discharged, we will ship their refills to their home free of charge. We have a free iPhone application to order refills.
The concept behind the Lifespan’s push, according to Collins, is to further efforts toward “accountable care,” ensuring safe transitions to patients in the discharge process. “Nationally, almost half of all medication errors occur at the time of transitions in care,” she said. “We don't want to ‘discharge’ our patients to an outside pharmacy at that most critical point.”
