A Drug-Dealing Robot That Upends the Pharmacy Model
FOR ALL THE emphasis on design in the business world, there are entire classes of objects and experiences that feel stuck in time. Take a trip to the pharmacy—you wait in line, peruse the latest celebrity scandal in US Weekly, ponder whether peanut M&M’s purchased at the pharmacy count as health food, and pray that no embarrassing instructions accompany your meds.
A startup pharmacy called PillPack hopes to change this archaic process. For $20 a month, PillPack will deliver prescription drugs to patients with the efficiency of Amazon Prime. Pillpack came to life thanks to a new incubator program at the famed design consultancy IDEO and the core of their service is a small blue box that organizes all of your med into “dose packets,” little plastic baggies marked with the date and time they’re to be taken. A jumble of amber bottles are replaced by an efficient to-do list made of drugs.
‘CVS’s iPad app is a 3-D representation of their store. In one fell swoop it shows everything wrong with pharmacy and software.’
This simple innovation makes life easier for seniors who can be a bit forgetful and have difficulty with bottles. Younger patients with active lifestyles and chronic diseases can just pull as many packets as they need and go. The trail of empty packets means there is never any doubt about missed doses, and each order comes with a custom infographic that shows a full color picture of each pill, explains what it does, and clarifies any special instructions. Ointments, inhalers, and other non-pill products are included in the box as well. All told, PillPack means you’ll never have to help your grandma sort pills into a tacky day-of-the-week organizer again.
Despite being a mail-order operation, PillPack is a licensed pharmacy, just like CVS or Walgreens, and serves patients in 31 states. They accept most major insurance plans, as well as Medicare Part D, and customer service is available 24/7. Switching prescriptions only takes a few minutes on their website and patients as young as 12 and as old as 88 have been testing the service for the past few months. Unlike brick and mortar pharmacies, they don’t carry cigarettes or homeopathic “treatments,” but otherwise the experience is just like going to your local drug store.