Allyson Harris
The Effect of Cost and Timely Patient Education About Prescription Delivery on Utilization of Delivery Services
Allyson Harris is a pharmacy resident at Kroger in West Jordan, UT.
“The purpose of this study was to address barriers that prevent successful retrieval of medications from the pharmacy by increasing patient awareness of available prescription delivery services and evaluating how delivery costs affect utilization.
An increasingly prevalent situation that reflects medication nonadherence is when a patient fails to retrieve their medication from the pharmacy. Potential barriers that patients often face when tasked with picking up a prescription include lack of transportation, inability to leave home, inconvenience, or lack of time. Although most pharmacies provide a prescription delivery option to address such issues, it is largely an underutilized service.
It is very exciting to be able to incorporate a cost element into my study thanks to the APhA incentive grant. I will now be able to evaluate how cost affects a patient's decision to utilize prescription delivery services. This will be accomplished by comparing prescription delivery utilization rates between pharmacies that offer free delivery to patients, which will be reimbursed to those pharmacies using the grant money, and pharmacies that offer prescription delivery at the standard cost.”