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Retail pharmacy -Pains
- Thread starter Rxman
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Areas that are a pain to deal with or areas of pain meaning pain management? I'm assuming the former, but the latter may be possible, though I've never heard of it. Of course I haven't seen "substantial pain areas" used to describe anything outside of pain management either.
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As a pharm. tech. the following are some hassels that you can see through out the day, they mostly involve dealing with customers that do not listen which can be frusterating. But, as far as acutal pains of operation, there are few.
1. when medicaid goes down and customers think its your fault you can't give them their lortab and xanax perscription.
2.prior authorizations for medicaid (not that bad)
3.sometimes doctors nurses can be really dumb.(rarely, but it happens)
4.people calling in refills for everything they have refills for, even though they don't know what their taking. then when they pick them up their mad because they were denied soma.
5.When customers get confused about the pharmacy oweing on a perscription.
6.pseudophed purchase's (operation) (10 mins of entering in info. on a comp. for something that costs 1.23, and you know they're going to make meth with it anyway.)
7.kids playing with the blood pressure cuff
8. really old relief pharmacist that dont know how to use the computer so it takes 15 mins to acutally scan and check a script (personal experince)
9. when a customer doesn't understand that medicaid doesnt pay for the benzodiazepine family of drugs, no matter how many times you tell them why they can't have their valium.
10. um these nine were really hard to think of, and some of them are similar to one another mostly dealing with people that really need help but dont want it from you.
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If that's the case let me bump the what I learn from my patients thread. It should be funny and somewhat informative. Besides I haven't had the chance to read it in a while.
I haven't laughed that hard in a long time!!!! Thanks for bumping the thread. Made my day!!!
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Any issues with regards to adjudication,formulary and rebate management,DUR, Will call management areas ... ?
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Yes - I think these are actually the biggest issues which will have the most impact on the profession. But, you're asking the wrong people. A tech won't have any idea about this and most retail pharmacists won't either if they work for a large corporation.
Formulary choice is often a determination of a PBM, but the retail end decides if they can accomodate what is on that forumulary. Likewise, all pricing needs to be factored in - actual costs, costs including rebates & incentives, wholesale contacts - what are the costs involved in restocking/over or under ordering, corporations which used automatic order systems vs those which use a manual system, how easy it is to move merchandise within the corporate system rather than return it.
These are things that really go on at the pharmacy manager & corporate level unless you are working for a private pharmacy. Issues like adjudication are built into the software package which a company buys and no employee has any say in that. There are times you have to get the help desk to override the software, but those times are few.
I don't see will call management to be an issue at all.
The new issue on the horizon is the actual management of MTM. Where is all this data kept (it has to be kept for 3 years), who follows through, the window of billing is small - someone needs to be on top of it for reimbursement. This is a mindset away from billing a product, which is easy for us - we now have to set up being able to keep track of billing our services and actually doing it.
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The biggest pain in terms of operations that I witnessed was the fact that at Walgreens, you don't need a BS in business or an MBA or anything to "run" a store. With that being said, there were several times a manager/kid straight out of high school would come back to the pharmacy and completely disrespect the entire pharmacy staff and say how to "correctly" run the pharmacy. It's a huge power trip for a lot of managers. One day, one of the pharmacists snapped back with the 'ole "I have a doctorate in a high demand health field and am granted powers by the state board of pharmacy to be capable of running this pharmacy" line. The manager was dumbfounded, went into the store office, and probably wept like a little girl.
