September 23, 2010 
The study came out yesterday. I pulled the data from the executive summary into a powerpoint for all you visual people like me. Some interesting statistics on the value of pharmacy satisfaction and retention. Maybe this will create the business case for more tracking and focus on impacting satisfaction in pharmacy. I think we’ve seen that over the past few years for managed care with individual insurance.
Before you peek, who (pharmacy type) do you think gets the highest average ranking in satisfaction?
Enabling Healthy Decisions 
Jim Wilson (www.wilsonrx.com) posted a few comments on the survey. I’m moving them from the survey site to here…
Your poll question highlights one of the major shortcomings of “closed ended” survey questions. Having surveyed consumers about pharmacy satisfaction for more than ten years, long before JD Power, the WilsonRx Pharmacy Customer Satisfaction Survey© has consistently found that independent pharmacy customers are significantly more satisfied with their pharmacy compared to all other types if pharmacies. Since your poll failed to list this as an option, the results can and do show misleading information. Another type of pharmacy with high levels of satisfaction consists of clinic pharmacies which include HMO clinics such as Kaiser Permanente and military treatment facilities (MTFs), which also rank highly in satisfaction.
Another consideration you need to think about is the audience you are polling. You may get different results if you poll: Pharmacists versus Consumers; (high volume, low volume, age – seniors versus younger patients; location (rural versus urban); payer (cash versus copay, high versus low copay, etc); and many other potential factors such as the use of mail order, drive through; patient counseling and other consumer services. This is not such an easy question to answer in a web based closed ended poll. But thanks for asking.
George,
Sorry to nitpick, but mail pharmacies are measured using different metrics than brick-and-mortar pharmacies. Therefore, it’s not technically accurate to compare mail-order rankings to other formats.
Just my $0.02, but JDP should more clearly communicate this important distinction, perhaps by using a different scale for mail-order.
Adam
The PCMA released a statement about the study and also included some other studies that have supported the mail order value proposition…
• The Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FTC concluded in a 2005 report that PBM-owned mail-order pharmacies offer lower prices on prescription drugs than retail pharmacies and are very effective at capitalizing on opportunities to dispense generic medications.
• Pharmacotherapy: Official Journal of the American College of Clinical Pharmacy. Peer-reviewed data found that highly automated mail-service pharmacies dispensed prescriptions with 23-times greater accuracy than retail pharmacies. The mail-service error rate was zero in several of the most critical areas, including dispensing the correct drug, dosage, and dosage form.
• American Journal of Managed Care. Consumers receiving their prescription medications for chronic conditions through a mail-service pharmacy “were more likely to take them as prescribed by their doctors than did patients who obtained them from a local pharmacy,” according to a recent study published in the American Journal of Managed Care. Key findings from UCLA and Kaiser Permanente’s Division of Research include:
o 84.7 percent of patients who received their medications by mail at least two-thirds of the time stuck to their physician-prescribed regimen, versus 76.9 percent who picked up their medications at “brick and mortar” Kaiser Permanente pharmacies.
o Mail-order pharmacy users were more likely than local pharmacy users to have a financial incentive to fill their prescriptions by mail (49.6 percent vs. 23.0 percent), and to live a greater distance away from a local pharmacy (8.0 miles vs. 6.7 miles).