Amazon PillPack – Your medication, sorted and delivered
pillpack.com
pillpack.com
If you take multiple medicines, and/or have a complex medication schedule, it’s super convenient. It self audits whether you took your meds already and avoids spending a lot of time sorting pills into organizers.
It’s also really convenient for travel; just tear off the packets for the time you’ll be away.
[ed] fixed autocorrect error
When I was taking several different medications, I started seeing why this service would be useful, even as a relatively organized, non-impaired person.
To me it was an absolutely American thing from the movies: I've always had the posology written by doctors already in layman terms, and nobody counts pills, you just get the number of boxes needed for the period of treatment (e.g. now for a treatment for which I need 38.5 pills I got exactly 38.5, in all other EU countries I've lived in I'd get 1x40/2x20/4x10 boxes).
Loose pills in bottles are seen as a hazard in most countries after contamination/confusion incidents.
Maybe they only do it if they think you'll have difficulty managing it yourself.
https://www.globalsupport.harvard.edu/travel/advice/tips-tra....
So 20mg Med A, 10mg Med B Morning 9/26/2023
The time depends on your prescription. So you can ask your doc to write it how you need.
Wonder if it's still under patent and Amazon jacked up the licensing fee?
Several other pharmacies offer similar products: https://medbox.com/ https://www.simplemeds.com/ https://accupacrx.com/ etc
There is nothing innovative about this.
My mother's pills wer organised by day and time of day 15 years ago.
ALso comments about how it saves wasted pills don't make sense for me. The doctor prescribes x pills for the course of treatment. So the pharmasist gives you x pills.
Yes for ibuprofen and other drugs you take as needed then you will have some left over as typically you have a headache and take one dose.
Yep, they do
> Also comments about how it saves wasted pills don't make sense for me
People don't follow instructions sometimes, and doctors overprescribe for the instructions they give you. My doctor wrote me a prescription for something a long time ago and warned me about the risk of addiction. They said I should stick to a dose, but prescribed me a larger amount because I could take more _if I needed it_ for a day or two. The pharmacist filled the prescription for about 3x what I should have been given without blinking an eye.
There are costs involved in appointments and filling prescriptions and you being trusted with an excess gives the system some flexibility that might avoid an extra appointment or visit to pharmacy.
Did it turn out ok?
Also in my experience pharmacists dislike having to do this laborious process.
I really want to work with local pharmacies on something like this and not faceless, nameless, outsourced Amazon.
Am I alone?
Yes.
> I really want to work with local pharmacies on something like this
Local pharmacies don't want to work with you and really don't want an initiative like amazon's one to exist.
Amazon usually take advantage of large scale economy to get profits off optimized costs. Local pharmacies just apply a markup to get their profit.
You'd think so, but not on medication. Most of them at least.
Looking into it recently since the business fascinates me, independent pharmacies operate more like gas stations selling gas as a loss leader, making it up on convenience items.
Many drugs don't even get reimbursed at break even by PBMs these days.
Within a decade not a single independent will exist.
Local pharmacies absolutely want to work with you on stuff like this, many have for decades already. Like many industries, they are being squeezed out as some Ivy MBA decides they want every ounce and then some of that consumer surplus. This is done on purpose to push patients to the vertically integrated options like CVS Caremark.
They cannot compete in an environment where consumers will walk over a $3 difference, and they get squeezed by PBMs on the other side.
Anyone fulfilling via Amazon is playing with fire in my opinion. It's gonna work until you eventually get hit by the shortages that are only likely to increase. The ability to talk to a human is going to become extremely important, and likely only available to the very wealthy at this point.
Amazon is less taking advantage of scale, and more that of regulatory capture in my mind. The big innovation is being big enough the other monopoly players can't just totally dictate terms.
Further consolidation means more medical system for the rich and less for the poor, and I’m fundamentally against that, especially when the main selling point is convenience.
No you‘re not. Haven‘t touched or spent money with Amazon for several years.
People act like this societal direction is inevitable.
e.g. you might take some pills right after you wake up and some pills right before you go to bed.
If you wake up every day at 7am and go to sleep at 11pm then that's easy, but if your schedule is constantly fluctuating (go to bed at 8am and waking up at 3pm) I can imagine how it might become confusing.
With a more erratic schedule, "take this pill at 10am on Tuesday" is a more valuable reminder than with a regular schedule where you might take it triggered by a regular event.
For example if a medication has sedating effects (such as some antidepressants) it may be advised to be taken before bed so this side effect is turned into something generally beneficial (more sleep) and less prevalent during waking hours).
Statins (cholesterol lowering medications) are usually prescribed at night time as this is when your cholesterol catabolism is most active.
Pain relief is often varied around sleep schedules
Insulin is scheduled around meals and sleep
Etc etc.
Antidepressants may be advisable to take before bed as a rule, but it's an excellent example of drugs that are supposed to be taken at the same time every day. Irregularly moving around the hour you take the antidepressant makes them less likely to work.
That's why irregular sleep schedules aren't a good reason to move medication.
My company changed FSA card providers and PillPack wouldn't let me use my FSA card moving forward because they kept trying to put a $1 preauth on it which my FSA card vendor kept rejecting. Pillpack's response was "lol, too bad" and I ended up having to go back to traditional pharmacy services.
From there I ended up moving onwards to try using medication dispensers to help me keep track of my medications -- finding Hero Health, using that happily for a couple years, until they decided to raise the service price from $30 to $50 a month for just the dispenser alone.
Now I use a multi-partition vitamin cup with custom-printed labels (giant quantity indication, photo of each pill, markings/imprints, and name/dosage) and just manually dispense each pill and twist.
I’m lucky enough to not really need daily meds but went through a few supplement/nootropic phases and was surprised by how boring, mundane, and unsolved the sorting and taking pills problem is.
I remember reading Distress by Greg Egan and people had a “pharm” machine that would print out specific meds they need. Including things like mixing caffeine and vitamins to make up for a hangover or massive infection.
I wish I had one container I dumped everything into and just press a button and it figured out and spits out what I need to take then.
These individual packets seem close.
Also, the first company to get an AI to just sort out all the madness of back and forth with doctor, insurance, pharmacy to get right dose and price without lots of mental pain and frustration will help people. This seems closer to that too.
(2013)
If you don’t like your pharmacist, shop elsewhere. There are plenty of excellent ones with a strong desire to help. They probably don’t work at Chemist Warehouse though.
They lobby aggressively.
To get a prescription delivered home in Australia, you need to physically post the original prescription.
Total regulatory capture.
Have you seen our retail pharmacy prices? ( https://www.goodrx.com )
2/3 of COTUS is on the take for big Rx. It takes taking fucking gold bars for helping a foreign adversary as an "alleged" treasonous traitor to not get kicked out of office but just lose some subcommittee assignments. You can lie about your education, profess belief in whacky conspiracy theories, and not even understand how government works and still remain a representative. Oh, and a few of the latter wingnuts are precipitating an imminent government shutdown because there is zero accountability for behavior. And you can repeat Whitewater in Texas and get away with it.
https://www.statnews.com/feature/prescription-politics/feder...
It's called compounding: taking the active ingredients and smashing them into 1 pill is trivial. Manual tablet presses have existed for hundreds of years, and automatic tablet presses have existed for 70.
>>> metformin (diabetes), losartan (high blood pressure) and omeprazole (heartburn)
The sad metabolic state of the target audience
>>> Vit. D
which will do nothing if you are taking all the above
Amazon recently recalled something I was taking as counterfeit. They refunded $36.
Was it from the pharmacy?
> You’ve lost traceability
How is traceability different from pills being counted into orange bottles? That isn’t delivering medication in the original packaging from the manufacturer either.
I think in this case the benefits might outweigh any downsides. Taking the correct medication as perscribed is a major source of stress and problems for many people.
> Medication non adherence in patients leads to substantial worsening of disease, death and increased health care costs.
> and sometimes involves individual constraints (e.g. poor inhaler technique, problems remembering doses etc).
> A third type of non adherence is known as non conforming, this type includes a variety of ways in which medication are not taken as prescribed, this behavior can range from skipping doses, to taking medications at incorrect times or at incorrect doses, to even taking more than prescribed.
There were tons of leftovers in the EU, where I lived before - that's wasteful. Not a little bit of plastic.
> first [Canadian] National Prescription Drug Drop-Off Day, which resulted in the return of more than two tonnes of unused medications
> The first is inertia: it takes effort to discard something, but no effort to leave it where it is. The second is a natural inclination to keep something that might be useful later on, particularly if future procurement involves inconvenience or expense.
Every single person I know has a drug drawer with expired drugs.
Picking up common prescription medication consists of me walking into a pharmacy - any pharmacy! - with my prescription, handing it to them, and telling them "one of this please". They will then immediately retrieve the pack of that medicine, ask me some questions to check for allergies etc. and hand it to me. I don't have to have the prescription sent to a specific pharmacy then wait for them to have the bottle ready and verified by a pharmacist.
In the US, finding 1000 count (!) bottles is easy: https://www.cvs.com/shop/cvs-health-extra-strength-acetamino...
https://www.cnn.com/2013/02/08/health/us-uk-pain-sgmd/index....
On top of which, the maximum daily dose listed by many generics is not considered safe: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3585765/
Do you really think someone intent on killing himself will look at a blister pack and think, "You know, if this was in a bottle I'd go through with it, but this doesn't seem worth it, it's way too much work to take me own life"?
It doesn't sound like you know much about suicide research? Preferring to substitute your own guesses on a well researched topic.
It claims the previous higher maximum was anecdotally established but later supported as safe by multiple studies and the reason for the article seems to be concern that the new lower maximums could cause confusion in patients and doctors.
Wonder how much - very expensive - medication is wasted in the world.
That can be easier said than done with arthritis, vision issues and cognitive impairment, which isn't exactly uncommon with older patients.
My grandmother get her medicines re-boxed by my mother and I don't think she'd manage it on her own.
Traditional blister packing has been around for years, this isn’t a novel idea. This is just a wasteful implementation
A lot of expensive medication is cheap to manufacture. The money goes to R&D and profits (similar to software). For those medications it's likely that reduced waste would lead to the manufacturer raising the price, keeping the total cost similar.
Nonetheless, it would be interesting to see this made of paper.