“Proactive”

Your Local Pharmacy’s Approach to Covid-19

There are many thoughts experienced when trying to absorb news on the global pandemic, COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019). Are we overreacting? How concerned should I be? Is that lady with the truck bed full of toilet paper on to something or just too panicked? The news says to calm down, but also the NBA, NHL, and MLB have all altered their seasons. The truth is, we have struggled with how to field this as a brand new pharmacy for a few weeks now. Last night it sunk in - we are about to open a pharmacy, a brand new business, amid a healthcare and economic crisis. There is no way around it, the coronavirus is here and it is overwhelming our healthcare workers. As it stands now, most healthcare systems in the US are not equipped for the volume of active infections that could arise if no interventions are made. Our initial thoughts were to postpone our grand opening until May due to foot traffic being decreased, but after much deliberation have decided that there is probably not going to be a better time to show our community how much we care. This week let's talk about what COVID-19 is, how our community can come together, and how your local pharmacy plans to show up committed to playing our part. 

Depending on how much media you consume and what outlets you frequent, you might be have just heard the hysteria and missed what COVID-19 actually is. Coronavirus Disease 2019 is part of a large family of viruses that are common in humans and many species of animals. Scientists originally thought the virus was the result of a zoonotic event (animal to human transmission) but now are unsure exactly how this particular mutation occurred. Symptoms include fever, cough, and shortness of breath appearing 2-14 days after exposure. The CDC summarizes as follows: “The complete clinical picture with regard to COVID-19 is not fully known. Reported illnesses have ranged from very mild (including some with no reported symptoms) to severe, including illness resulting in death. While information so far suggests that most COVID-19 illness is mild, a report out of China suggests serious illness occurs in 16% of cases. Older people and people of all ages with severe underlying health conditions like heart disease, lung disease and diabetes, for example, seem to be at high risk of developing serious COVID-19 illness.” If you are thinking that this sounds a lot like the flu, you would be correct. If you are thinking that symptoms appearing 14 days after exposure seems unusual, you are also correct. The way the virus presents itself in the population is one of the main reasons this virus in particular is getting so much attention. Some of the buzz terms surrounding coverage of COVID-19 are “flattening the curve”and “social distancing”. We believe this virus is spread by respiratory droplets that can be shared from up to 6 ft away, not something unusual for pathogens. We commonly suggest that people infected or those that think they are infected do logical things like: limit contact with others, cover your mouth/nose when you cough or sneeze, and wash your hands more than regularly. Obviously those things apply here, but the period from transmission to symptom presentation is longer than most threats we face making “social distancing” important in combating the spread of COVID-19. For this reason alone, we have seen a massive wave in the cancelation of large gatherings and lots of guidance on self-quarantining. This is not an overreaction and will go a long way in “flattening the curve”. The curve(s) refers to a spike in cases that would normally occur over a set period of time - that “curve” peaks sharply in transmission modeling that assumes no change in behavior. Conversely, if measures like the above are taken, that curve does not peak as sharply over the same amount of time - it flattens. There is no escaping that there will be a large amount of people infected by this virus, however we can adjust the intensity of how many over what time by taking advice on social distancing and contact reduction. Curbing the amount of people being treated by our healthcare teams at any given time is paramount and acknowledging that COVID-19 should change some of our behavior is a big first step. 

  While retail pharmacy does not have a direct role in treating patients who have been hospitalized due to the virus, we can have an enormous impact on contact reduction. The general population will need their maintenance medications whether they are infected or not, therefore pharmacies could be one of the main drivers in education and system implementation. Independent pharmacies are poised to change workflow quickly, adapt to new policies overnight, and test new modes of service better than any other type of pharmacy. Did we plan financially for a global pandemic to overlap our grand opening? No, but let's do this. We have a plan to introduce our community to Front Range Pharmacy in a meaningful way while minimizing your exposure to COVID-19. We have brainstormed ways to reduce your unnecessary contact with others should Denver become severely affected. We can deliver to your door. We can bring your meds to your car. We can pack your meds into our DayPacks and reduce your pharmacy visits. We can be your source for updates and education on the pandemic. We are working hard to bring all of these services to life - some much sooner than when we originally planned. We have said before that a strength in being an independent pharmacy is being nimble, and we look forward to being the most flexible and accommodating option you have. While we are anxious to get our doors open, we are striving to do this the right way with the right resources. COVID-19 has definitely changed the context of our grand opening, but we see an opportunity to serve our community in a way not currently offered. A novel threat deserves a novel response - we hope that you will give us the opportunity to be a resource you love and can count on. We are preparing to open our doors differently than we originally imagined and will use the next couple of weeks to perfect our approach. Next week we are announcing our grand opening date, and we can’t wait to serve you. 

Fake Spring

Let's not kid ourselves. Yes, the air is warmer, the days are getting longer, and the season of Spring officially begins this month. In Colorado, we understand that this means absolutely nothing and what has actually happened is our moody friend, Fake Spring, has shown up giving us some seriously mixed vibes. We are going to get some more snow, we all know it. Our ashy winter legs will also be treated to some 80° sunshine the day after said snow. Poor plants will be tricked into blooming, pollinating, and then freezing to literal death - its horrifying. Fake Spring is a punk bringing us premature pollen and wildly unstable temperatures. Our bodies do not love this time of year, and let us pharmacists tell you… it shows. This week we are going to talk about a pharmacist’s talent in navigating the over-the-counter section and how Fake Spring is one of the many times we can save time and money.  

Though many large, chain pharmacies would like you to believe otherwise, pharmacists know just as much about over-the-counter (OTC) medications as we do prescription drugs. As many pharmacies construct physical barriers between patients and their pharmacists, we at Front Range want to be drastically different by being your drug expert in the aisles, not just behind the counter. Fake Spring is one of the seasons that we feel like we could work an entire shift in the OTC section. There is a ridiculous amount of marketing to see beyond in order to select the right product for your symptoms and the choices seem to be endless. Before you go reaching for whatever was in the last commercial you saw, you should know that this unique time of year in Colorado presents some additional challenges to treating allergies. The dry air, high altitude, and temperature fluctuations mean that using some products marketed for “multi-symptom allergies” might make things worse for you instead of better. Nosebleeds, dry eyes and mouth, even constipation are common but can be mitigated if you consult your pharmacist. Do you have high blood pressure? Suffer from narrow angle glaucoma? Are you a frequent consumer of grapefruits? All of these matter, some quite a bit, and your pharmacist should be at your side to guide you when selecting OTC medications. While March and April send people clamoring into the pharmacy, the point we are trying to make here is that your pharmacist should have the time and bandwidth to help you select non-prescription meds during all seasons. Not sure whether to suffer through the waiting room and pay your out-of-pocket for the doctor? Come see your pharmacist, you would be shocked how many times we could save you time and money but still get you feeling better. Year after year, we experience people showing up with antibiotic prescriptions to treat symptoms actually cured by just an antihistamine and nasal decongestant. Pharmacists can easily see when a patient is struggling to decide what product is right for them, but are not always given the time to step out and offer counsel. When planning Front Range, we understood that being educated on OTC medications is just as important as prescriptions and designed our pharmacy accordingly. From behind the counter we can see all aisles and we created two exits in the pharmacy to quickly serve patients on either side. We want to be there to share with you expert knowledge, not watch you buy the prettiest box of nonsense from the shelf.

This week we set down to pick out our entire OTC inventory and deliberately selected products we believe in and can stand behind. If something isn’t worth your money, will not solve your problem, or interacts with your prescription medications, Front Range will tell you. Instead of marching towards corporate-driven metrics everyday, we are here to listen to your problems and give as much guidance as professionally possible. When you leave with a product or a prescription, we want you to go with confidence that you made a good decision versus being rushed out of the pickup line with no time to ask questions. From allergies to constipation, scraped knees to dandruff, we are trained in all of it and actually want to help you feel better and live healthy. At Front Range Pharmacy, your medication experts will be at your fingertips with kind, professional, and transparent advice. You are going to love your local pharmacy!

Work, work, work…

Tired is an understatement, but the excitement from seeing everything come together is the best fuel for moving forward. This week we have been busy in our space installing all the things we made at home - both drop ceilings, our pharmacy surround, our first indoor sign, our pharmacy cabinets, and our transaction counter cabinets. From driving scissor lifts to leveling our counter height, we are almost done with our DIY commitments and it feels amazing. We are happy to see how things are coming together, check out a little video made from moments collected this week!

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@burdseyephotography

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America, vanished into thin healthcare?

Not much compares to the feeling of reassurance. We take risks, second guess our choices, and question our purpose regularly as we move through life. Reassurance comes in the form of our loved ones cheering us on, awards for our successes, and compliments from the ones we serve. Reassurance is a welcome feeling when we are stressed or feeling complacent. Keep going. You are on the right path. You will make a difference. Very few of us can reach success without these words - without reassurance. Pharmacy school, like many professional schools, is a very stressful time. You fight for your seat, test every other day, and try your best to fit the entirety of the pharmaceutical world into your brain before graduation. Your professors fill you with energy and purpose, pharmacists from all sectors arrive to share the difference they are making in their patients, and you round through rotation after rotation exploring just how much America leans on their drug experts. Most of our fellow pharmacists can relate to the invigoration for our profession that one finds in school. It’s true - our nation saves more and more money the further pharmacists are integrated into the health systems and the stats are endless. We as a country spend almost $300 billion annually on medication non-adherence and adverse drug reactions. Almost 50% of people taking medications for chronic diseases do not take them correctly making improper medication use is one of the main causes of hospitalizations. Some states have taken a deep dive into just how much patients benefit from pharmacist integration - one state citing that every dollar spent on a pharmacist resulted in the state saving $4.40. Understand that those savings are actually patients not going to the hospital or being put on improper regimens - the savings are directly related to a healthier community. If you are a student pharmacist wondering if you can make a difference in the healthcare, we assure you, you can. 

One solution to optimizing America’s prescription woes is simple - every time medication is involved in patient care, there should be a pharmacist screening not just the drug regimen but the individual person and their unique characteristics. Remarkable progress has been made in this realm and pharmacists continue to prove value, however, most of this occurs in hospitals and ambulatory care settings. Our wholesaler conducted a study a few years back stating that individuals visit their local pharmacist over eight times more frequently than their doctor, and that 95% of Americans live within 5 miles of a pharmacy. To every pharmacy student, it seems like retail pharmacy is poised to become an actual healthcare destination, instead of just a transaction counter and our professors agree. Upon entering the workforce, that reassurance is shaken. The reality before us is a heavily saturated market of wildly underutilized pharmacists. The impact we trained so hard to deliver in school seems to have no place in chain pharmacies. The professors and preceptors that gave us a wealth of knowledge are replaced by supervisors who have little appreciation for the quality of work pharmacists are capable of. It seems like to excel in a large corporate pharmacy, you If you must step further away from patients and absorb yourself in a computer screen. All your training in interviewing and documenting patient interaction is sidelined by initiatives to make patients use automated systems that distance them from their pharmacist. Why are we creating so much distance between America and the healthcare professional they have the most access to? 

Increased access to pharmacists is happening and much of the trailblazing is being done by our colleagues in independent pharmacy. Independent pharmacies have morphed from the friendly, nostalgic corner drug store to travel clinics, chronic disease management headquarters, and collaborative practices that operate as an extension of your primary care physician. Pharmacist business owners are approaching legislators, third party payers, and state health plans with proposals to optimize the care that our profession can deliver to patients. At Front Range Pharmacy, we plan to join our colleagues in pioneer spirit and galvanize our fellow healthcare providers to come together in new ways. We are fortunate to live in a state that believes in the not-so-progressive idea that the more access to healthcare our community has, the better it is. Colorado has passed and hopes to pass legislation that paves the way for pharmacists to stand where they are, but serve in new roles. Pharmacists are on the cusp of being able to manage HIV therapies, conduct point of care testing for common illnesses, and deliver therapy interventions all from the most common post in our profession- the retail pharmacy. Yes, your pharmacist is trained in ways that they have never been able to serve. The question we asked ourselves while working in a large chain is, when the opportunity arrives for us to do more, will our current positions allow it? The reality is we were watching the company march in the wrong direction - away from capitalizing on their biggest asset and our nation’s most accessible professional. Pharmacists can succeed in making room for our care in a payer system that clearly sees value in doing so, but only if the pharmacist has the bandwidth to step away from dispensing. At Front Range we plan to lay the ground work for dispensing medications efficiently and accurately, but also by making room for services our community will benefit from. Half the battle of becoming a resource is raising awareness of your value and we hope our community is ready and willing to work along side us for better healthcare. That would be the best dose of reassurance we could ask for. 

Highway Hypnosis

Ever drive home from somewhere, park you car, and hang up your keys only to realize that you don’t remember a single bit of the journey? You are home but you weren’t home just a literal “thought” ago. You obeyed traffic laws, took a sip of your coffee, and navigated yourself back to your door like the capable human you are… but your brain perceived the checkout counter and then immediately your kitchen island with nothing in between. This phenomenon, highway hypnosis, happens to most of us - meaning some of us are doing it at the same time others are. Isn’t that bonkers? We are here to tell you that opening your own pharmacy is mostly just like that. Maybe its more like fighting it off? Anyway, this week our blog is another progress update!

Taking Front Range from a paper business plan to a fully functioning business has occasionally seemed like one giant, blurry time lapse. Yes, some things seem to take forever while some things seem to happen overnight, but when trying to reassemble the timeline in our heads we have to look at each other in disbelief. This week we have paint going on our walls, our overhead utilities are completely finished, and we are prepping our DIY projects for install. At the same time, we are preparing to be inspected by the DEA, contracting with Medicaid, writing our processes and procedures, creating patient intake forms, and preparing our NCPDP profile for third party acceptance. We have been shocked to see the progress in the store, but frustrated with the timelines presented on our insurance contracting front. For an independent pharmacy to contract with various insurers there are many hoops to jump through. You have to be inspected by multiple governing bodies, align yourself with a group of other independent pharmacies, and wait in many many digital queues for the most basic information or update. Luckily we were able to work the state, DEA, and our Pharmacy Services Administration Organization to get this process to overlap our construction - this is huge. Onboarding with each insurer can take 45-60 days, killing a pharmacy’s cash on hand if they are fully constructed and paying those bills with no revenue. Even with all that forethought and an organized approach, we learned that we will not be contracted with CVS/Caremark (a very large insurer) until late Spring. Despite giving them our onboarding documents 65 days ahead of our grand opening, they plan to take 120 days to deliver us a contract that we have zero ability to change or negotiate. We literally just sign it and return it. That is twice as long as any other insurer and the same amount of time it took us to completely build our pharmacy! Setbacks like these are unfortunate and out of our control, so we are pushing forward everything else as fast as we can. This week we ordered lobby furniture, interior signage, and our narcotic safe. We are designing our vial caps, prescription bags, and the boxes for our DayPacks. When the paint drys in the space we are commandeering a scissor lift to install our drop ceilings and pharmacy surround. Shortly after that we are taking the woodshop to S Broadway to install our homemade cabinets and millwork. We are super happy with the way our brand is going to be physically communicated, but we can’t wait to put some personality and service behind it.

Front Range Pharmacy gets more real every single day. We have a grand opening date picked out, but have to wait another week or two to be cleared by the city on a few last inspections. Our construction finishes the second week of March, our tech installs happen immediately after, then we have 2 weeks of training and troubleshooting scheduled. We feel like the last three months have been a whirlwind and we are super grateful for the love and support of our family, friends, and community. Front Range is shaping up to be something neither of us pictured it to be and better than our paper business plan aimed for. Thank you for your encouragement and positivity, we look forward to serving you soon.

Its True, and We Know its Time for a Change

It is rare that pharmacists get a platform to discuss frustrations or concerns about the “quantity over quality”, volume-driven job market present today. This week there has been an onslaught of breaking news regarding the intense work environment of pharmacists employed by the top three corporations and the unacceptable consequences that trickle down to patients everyday. In the chain setting, the threshold allowing two pharmacists on duty for a shift is so high that a single pharmacist could fill over 500 prescriptions (that is over 1 per minute) per shift and still be the only professional on duty. With over 10,000 pharmacists graduating every year into a job market that is completely saturated, finding positions in any mode of their profession is extremely difficult. Year after year the amount of jobs available to these young graduates decreases on a national level and competition rises. The average pharmacist graduates from their doctorate program with over $120,000 in student loan debt. The $1400 monthly payment on this debt incentivizes new pharmacists to quickly obtain any job the market provides. Once in the door, of what is usually a large corporation, they must do everything possible to keep their position- after all the line behind their job will only continue to grow. With every large pharmacy chain having so many applicants and so little jobs, how could a pharmacist go against the grain and stand up for the quality of care they want to provide? Sure there are “anonymous” surveys for improved working conditions, but when you have to attach your store number and position to the form in order to submit, you really can’t hide from anyone. The link between the ability for our nation’s top three pharmacies to squeeze more and more out of a single pharmacist to the amount of prescription errors or care oversights is obvious and catastrophic. You may have read the concerning NY Times article released a few days ago or some of the spinoff media resulting from that piece. Since the topic is finally getting some press, this week we would like to discuss how our past position of managing corporate pharmacies influenced our different standard of care at Front Range. 

In a market where providers are getting less and less reimbursement while insurers and administrators rack up our healthcare dollars, investing to create proportionally staffed pharmacies is a priority chain pharmacies struggle to address. Solutions to combat pharmacist fatigue or distress in these corporate settings often come in the form of mandatory lunch breaks, where the pharmacy closes for 30 minutes and the work piles up for even more chaotic processing upon return. Sometimes management will send floor personnel to cashier in the pharmacy, but they do not have the extensive training of a technician and often create more work that only pharmacy staff can repair. Increasing technician hours simply never occurs proportional to the increase in task volumes - and if it did, there would be even more supervision required by the still lone pharmacist. Obviously these mediocre efforts are the result of greed in the pharmacy business model, and further enforces the way these businesses change: being reactive vs proactive. During our time with our former employer, the reaction of upper management to cut expenses instead of relying on quality service to increase revenues was discouraging and an inappropriate stance to take in our changing healthcare landscape. We could not accept that Front Range Pharmacy must follow course to be successful. We will serve our community by putting your health first instead of padding profits.

The amount of money that each and every chain pharmacy spends on corporate oversight and supervisor positions is astronomical. Our independently owned pharmacy invests in providing professionals to serve you verses detached, offsite personnel that have never been trained as pharmacy staff. At Front Range, your pharmacists are the owners and we made sure that there were two of us from the start. Front Range will always operate from the perspective of more training, bigger hearts, better care. By having two pharmacists from day one we are afforded immediate onsite professional collaboration, less task fatigue, and more time to spend with you. Staffing more liberally will also allow us to cultivate a positive relationship with other healthcare providers in order to create a more streamlined pathway to your health. The reality is all pharmacies are getting paid based on the quality of patient outcomes, but large corporations refuse to let pharmacists step up and be the healthcare practitioner they can be. There are simply too many tiers of leadership for change to matriculate through and almost 100% of these positions are occupied by persons who have no hands-on healthcare experience. One of the huge benefits of being a small company is we can implement change quickly, whereas our competitors have an endless stream of cogs that must be turned. Our pharmacist-owned and operated company has the ability to be proactive and versatile as our profession continues to evolve. Services offered at Front Range will be extensive and include many avenues for our pharmacists to improve the health of our community. By prescribing birth control, creating flu and strep testing protocols, and managing HIV medications, our patients will have the ability to do so much more with the healthcare professionals they see the most. As the years go by, pharmacists will be relied on to create a bigger impact in your health and we are building a company that is prepared for those opportunities. We plan to not only adventure into uncharted territory as pharmacists, but also reflect on what we have the power to improve as business owners: our workplace culture. Performance reviews will be based on patient feedback, concerns, and praise vs metrics that are generated by groups of executives that have never worked a single shift inside the pharmacy. Employees will be encouraged to use their voice and we hope to create an environment that empowers our staff to feel a part of the bigger picture. Pushing our pharmacists and technicians to operate at the top of their license (verses at their functional wit’s end) is surely to result in a staff that is more knowledgable, fulfilled, and more productive by default. 

The NY Times article is sparking much needed conversation and attention to the plight of the overworked pharmacist and its impact on you, the patient. Errors and mistakes in healthcare are unavoidable but most can be easily prevented when pharmacists are equipped with the time and tools they need to work safely. While no healthcare professional is immune to error, we simply want to eliminate the unnecessary distractions and stressors that plagued our former positions. Front Range Pharmacy is just as impacted, if not more, by the constricting profits in our marketplace, but our approach to business will always be to care for our team so that they can care for you. Our community needs the flexibility and deliberate care of an independent pharmacy and we cannot wait to introduce you to Front Range. 

Two Sides to the Coin

Your local pharmacy’s take on the opiate crisis

While planning this business, a lot of our colleagues and friends asked how the opiate crises would play a role in shaping our pharmacy. It is a multifaceted issue that we as pharmacists must navigate every single day, but one that we can now can impact more than ever as business owners. While the media covers this topic constantly, very rarely do we take the opportunity to open up a two-sided discussion. Part of the conversation must be to come up with solutions letting people taking opiates for legitimate pain exist in this healthcare landscape. We have seen over the years many of our patients with disease states resulting in chronic pain get caught in the crossfire between changing legislation and the reaction of their healthcare team. Why should the fear of this conversation result in drastic decisions and suboptimal outcomes for our patients? This we week we would like to discuss how Front Range would like to help our community discover a better path to wellness in the turmoil of the opiate crisis.

Our nation has recently opened its eyes to opiate abuse and misuse, and we can’t ignore the fact that over 130 people die daily from an opiate related drug overdose. Absolutely, our country must address the flood of these medications into hands that have no medical indication for them. The result of the negative press and statistical onslaught, has been legislation changes on state and federal levels. Thankfully, we now have limits on initial prescribing, state-wide data bases reflecting individual use, and easy access to the opiate reversal drug, naloxone. Historically, believe it or not, there hasn’t been much guidance or standardization for prescribing these medications, resulting in several approaches regarding care practices and prescribing. Across the US, and even across individual states, this resulted in patients getting a different standard of care depending on which doctor they saw. Patients with the same diagnosis received vastly different medication doses and were placed on inconsistent drug combinations all with unique pre-existing health conditions. Most legislation passed was at least state-wide and leaves out the individual needs the prior landscape created. Everyday we as pharmacists see patients that are struggling to exist in these new protocols. They are afraid to speak up about their new regimen or health concerns for fear of being labeled as an abuser. How is this healthcare? Why can’t every single patient be given a voice in their pain management path? America will benefit from analyzing pain management and opiate prescribing, but we cannot limit our perspective by only viewing abuse potential and forget that the treatment of pain is a legitimate part of healthcare.

It is hard to describe the wave of anxiety that rushes over patients when giving their pharmacy chronic pain prescriptions. Most of these patients have had a long, hard battle with painful disease states and ultimately must turn to their healthcare team in search of a normal life. Everyday people must depend on a lot of medications to live normally, not just opiates. Opiate dependency is not abuse, it is the result of being treated for chronic pain. Unfortunately, beginning treatment involving opiates results in many patients feeling stereotyped- they fear having friends or relatives find out what they are taking and being called an addict. They’ve had both doctor’s offices and pharmacies treat them with suspicion and are conditioned to talk less and less about their needs related to their opiate medications. In reality, an opiate medication’s effectiveness wanes over time and most people with chronic pain conditions will need to be titrated up from their starting doses to receive the same relief. This is especially difficult for those with cancer-related or severe chronic pain because their dose doesn’t ever get smaller unless their disease resolves. Conversely there are patients that have been mismanaged and end up on dosages much higher than needed. Each day in the pharmacy, we see a spectrum of patients being prescribed these medications. Pharmacists most definitely see abusers, but we also serve patients that are on these medications legitimately. So how can the solution to Amercia’s crisis be a one-size-fits-all model? Patients need advocates in seeking wellness, even in pain management. Front Range promises to step into the void and help to create a treatment plan unique to you. 

Our community is in need of a pharmacy where patients can finally be comfortable speaking up about their medication, especially opiates. While it is not up to your pharmacist to decide your health plan, we can do a better job of filling in the gaps and supporting our patients through potential or inevitable changes. Common mistakes made while optimizing pain regimens are titrating too aggressively, not equipping patients with supplemental medications to handle the differences, and being too committed to a particular timeline - your pharmacist can intervene in all of these. We are trained on appropriate dose increases and decreases and can vigilantly monitor your therapy based on what we see and pause to ask how you feel. Too many times do we have patients on a course to lower their medication but not equipped with supplemental therapies to help with agitation, sleep loss, and blood pressure swings - this takes a simple phone call to fix. We understand that dose increases and the initiation of opiates also mandate discussions with your pharmacist. Instead of shaming you into buying naloxone and pushing you out the door, we can sensitively talk about the insurance that is opiate reversal and your decision to keep it in your home. We are here to ensure you are given every opportunity to avoid unwanted side effects so you can continue to be successful in treating your pain and living normally. We will always encourage you to reach out when you feel overwhelmed or unsure about the direction your health plan is taking you. Front Range Pharmacy is being built on the idea that your healthcare is a priority regardless of affliction- that no matter what therapies you might be on, your voice is always included. We will do our part in combating the opiate crisis, but we promise to not compromise your quality of life in our efforts. We hope to eliminate the stigma behind any healthcare issue you have, and that your local pharmacy is always a place where you feel comfortable and empowered.

Alexa, Fill My Prescription

Not exactly, but kind of…

We are finally at that exciting time in construction when walls go up and drywall starts defining our space. Our vision at 3401 S Broadway is coming to life and it is time to start booking our technology installs in the weeks before we open. Planning these installations reminded us that we are spending more on technology than we are on our entire buildout- almost twice as much! We understand what we are competing against- we just quit jobs a large chains. We don’t plan to open our doors and offer less or make you pay more than our competition. We understand that we must add to your convenience and improve overall health for the same cost as across the street. This week would like to share with you our technologies and how we intend to use a modern approach to improve your health. 

A priority of ours while selecting pharmacy dispensing software was that grasping the “whole patient” image be easy when routinely checking prescriptions. Patients benefit from their healthcare providers treating every encounter as a part of a larger puzzle and not just an individual appointment. Your prescriptions should be no different. We want to account for not just your allergies and other meds, but also your health goals, preexisting conditions, habits, and special accommodations. Your health is continuous and dynamic. We believe that we must be able to see not just your history, but also adapt to current situations and incorporate your goals during each encounter. Another feature we made a priority is communication. From a patient perspective, we understand that there is more to talking with your pharmacist than just “your prescription is ready”. Patients need to ask confidential questions, get updated on their coverage status on prior authorizations, and want to know the best time to get a flu shot. Our software phone app allows for fully secure and HIPAA compliant texting between you and your Front Range pharmacist, as well as Front Range and your doctor. You can send images of pills you find on the ground, your new insurance card, or your child’s rash reaction to their medication - all securely and without waiting in line on the phone. A large pain point in software we have used in the past was the inability to effectively annotate your profile with special needs or requests. A strength in the software we have chosen is our ability to not only document things like needing a particular brand of a medication, but also setting our inventory thresholds to make that it is in stock when you expect it. Unlike our competition, we get to decide what kind and how much medication to keep on our shelves. Our pharmacy dispensing software is unlike anything we have had the chance to work with and affords us flexibility to serve you efficiently and consistently. 

If you have ever struggled with organizing your prescriptions or a had to manage a family member’s multiple medications, then you know tools like pill minders are a common solution. They are also time consuming to arrange, prone to human error, and you are still left with bulky pill bottles. At Front Range, one of our immediate goals was to help solve this problem. We specifically set aside money to purchase a robot that will pack a months worth of your medications into easy to use dose packs, all rolled up into a box that sits on your counter. Our Front Range “DayPacks” will have the name of each medication, the dose, and what time of day the pack is to be taken. This way you will always know what you are taking, when you are supposed to take it, and know if you miss any doses. This is a great option for a person who struggles to remember the timing of their medication, has kids on school meds, needs travel supplies, or cares for aging loved ones. We offer this service to anyone for free—whether you are on one medication or twenty, starting the day we open our doors. We are excited to share more about this technology and plan to make a video showing you the process, but for now feel free to visit our website to learn more!

We want our service to be purposeful and deliberate, and we are fortunate that independent pharmacies have so many incredible resources to make that happen. We are prepared to accommodate your preferences, listen to your feedback, and build comprehensive health goals that are realistic and unique to you. We have invested in the technology that not only makes it easier for us to care for you, but also simplifies how you care for yourself. We are ready to surprise you with just how easy and convenient switching to your local pharmacy will be.