The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.
On Monday, the Ohio Board of Pharmacy launched a tool to help people with low vision, hearing loss, or who face language barriers find pharmacies that can serve them.
For many, the pharmacy is the most frequent point of contact with the healthcare system. Pharmacists can consult about their medications and help them manage chronic conditions such as hypertension and diabetes.
The new website will help people with accessibility challenges find pharmacies that can serve their specific needs.
For example, patients with low vision can find pharmacies that provide oversized-font labels, prescription readers and braille labels.
It can point those with hearing loss to pharmacies that have video-relay services and teletypewriters. And it can tell non-English speakers where to find pharmacies with translation services for Spanish, Chinese, Nepali, Somali, and other languages.
In a statement, Board of Pharmacy Executive Director Steven W. Schierholt said the new webpage is an attempt to make pharmacy services more widely accessible.
“The launch of this convenient online search tool highlights the Board’s ongoing commitment to ensure pharmacy services are accessible to all Ohioans,” he said. “The Board is hopeful that this new webpage will help patients and their loved ones quickly identify pharmacies offering services they need to keep them healthy and safe.”
However, working against accessibility is a wave of pharmacy closures. For the better part of a decade, independent and small-chain pharmacies have said that huge prescription middlemen — CVS Caremark, OptumRx and Express Scripts — have been driving them from the field with low reimbursements, fees and clawbacks.
More recently, large chain pharmacies have been closing in droves.
CVS is at the end of a three-year process in which it closed 900 pharmacies across the country. Walmart last year asked 16,000 of its pharmacists to cut their hours.
Bankrupt Rite Aid this year announced the closures of hundreds of stores in Ohio and Michigan. And Walgreens this year said it would close “a significant portion” of 2,000 underperforming stores. That prompted Dave Burke, executive director of the Ohio Pharmacists Association, to say he was worried that pharmacy is becoming an untenable business.
“If Walgreens can’t make a go of this in 25% of their locations, my fear is that this becomes a much larger problem where other people who provide pharmacy services exit the market in whole or in part,” he said in September.
The Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether the giant health conglomerates that own the three big pharmacy middlemen are engaged in anticompetitive practices.
