It was only a matter of time before industries started listening to the demands of consumers pertaining to the convenience of delivery for things other than food. Year after year the list of items that can be brought right to a home or place of employment (or even hotel if you happen to be a tad forgetful) is growing.
Ice cream? Let’s get it on dry ice. Toilet paper? Thank you, Amazon Prime. Potatoes? JUST potatoes? Yup.
However, the majority of these goods could still suffice to wait a few days until the consumer is ready to hit the supermarket (maybe toilet paper being the outlier), but the matter of getting prescriptions dropped off on a doorstep could be the difference between getting healthy or remaining sick. For example, if you’ve got a prescription headed to the pharmacy for flu medication, odds are you also don’t feel great and just want to go home and crawl into bed.
The good news is, on-demand prescription delivery is now a reality. That fact is huge, and here’s why:
1) It increases patients’ adherence to medications.
When surveyed, 37% of patients state they left a prescription at the pharmacy due to inconvenience. There’s a myriad of reasons why this could happen. Perhaps they didn’t have transportation back to the pharmacy if it couldn’t be filled right away, were too sick to pick it up, or even left the pharmacy and forgot about it altogether. Any way you spin it, a lack of adherence from not picking up a prescribed medication not only harms patients’ health but contributes to significant dollar loss in the industry. The economic impact of non-adherence can amount to almost $289 billion dollars a year and hundreds of avoidable hospital readmissions.
2) Caregivers can catch a break as well.
For chronically ill patients, they often have someone that helps them on a day-to-day basis. This could be a nurse, or a trusted friend or family member. For that caregiver, having the ability to check an errand off the list means time spent on meaningful tasks like more quality time with the patient or finally getting to the rest of their to-dos. For some caregivers who are looking after more than one person, prescription delivery could mean an entire days’ worth of time back.
3) There are (finally) actual healthcare experts making these deliveries happen.
Imagine if the guy hooking up your cable TV wasn’t trained in hooking up your cable TV. Maybe it wouldn’t be a disaster, but it sure wouldn’t be convenient. With prescription delivery, the stakes are high. These are often medications people need to get through their day, and the person entrusted with the delivery should be trained in handling the particular package (not all medications come in pill form) and have an understanding of HIPAA. This means there should be actual healthcare experts building and maintaining the delivery technology, so when the medication finally trickles down to the hand of the patient, everything goes off safely and without a hitch. Great news, there is already a company making these moves.
There are so many reasons prescription delivery is already starting to positively impact patient well-being and consumer convenience. Medication delivery is primed to be the new wave, and for very good reasons.
Sources:
ScriptDrop Survey 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/well/the-cost-of-not-taking-your-medicine.html