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As Family Pharmacy prepares to close its Cumberland location later this month, company officials say they want to make this transition as painless as possible. For most customers, one of the only changes will be the location of the building. 

The company, which serves as the only pharmacy in Cumberland County, announced at the end of June it plans to shut the location at 1756 Anderson Highway as of July 18. Instead, customers will just have to travel a bit further down the road to Farmville, where Family Pharmacy is set up in the Longwood Village Shopping Center. The operations of the two will merge into one, with patient records transferring over. As we reported last week, it was a decision pharmacy manager Kim Wright said she had to make, mainly due to the constant lack of insurance reimbursement.

 And no, Wright is very clear, they didn’t send out and don’t plan to send out any written notice. Instead, she posted about the change on social media, where she could interact with customers already asking some questions.

But as people prepare for the transition, Wright said she and her staff are trying to make it easy. For one thing, the medication profiles of all customers will automatically transfer over to the Farmville location this month, meaning everything from what type of drug to how many and how often it gets filled will be on hand. Once the transfer is complete, company officials will also ask customers to go through their MedSync account. That’s just to make sure the profile is correct, what is needed and if you want to pick up the medication or have it delivered. If you don’t have a MedSync account, then you’ll be getting a call after July 18 to go over and confirm all of those same details. 

That’s one thing Wright said is changing for the immediate future, in order to help ease the transition. Cumberland patients will get free delivery of prescriptions for at least the first three months from the Farmville location. Another change is coming in terms of operating hours. The Cumberland location is closed on Saturdays, but the Farmville pharmacy is open from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. on those days. And if you accidentally call the Cumberland location once it’s closed, don’t be surprised when someone responds. The goal is to have all calls forwarded to the Farmville pharmacy for a while. 

Fixing the problem for Family Pharmacy

As we detailed last week, the reason Family Pharmacy is closing in Cumberland is due to issues with Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBM). These are the groups that administer prescription drug insurance benefits. They negotiate prices between drug manufacturers and pharmacies, as well as determine the list of covered drugs and reimbursement. And to be clear, this isn’t something a county or even a regional group can help with. In the wake of Family Pharmacy’s June announcement, there were complaints from people asking why Cumberland County didn’t find ways to “make this work”. 

The simple answer is it would have been extremely difficult for that to happen. The problem, as we detailed in that first piece, is the fact pharmacy benefit managers don’t provide full payments. In other words, a medication could cost $600 to buy and the PBM decides that the pharmacy will only be reimbursed $525 for it. The only way for a county to help in that situation would be to fill the hole the pharmacy managers created. For a county like Cumberland, which is already struggling to pay for things like schools and needed repairs to county buildings, it’s almost impossible to ask for them to help financially.  

Waiting for the state  

On the bright side, there is an actual solution coming next year. Earlier this year, we reported on the Save Local Pharmacies Act, which overwhelmingly passed the Virginia House and Senate before being signed into law. All of our local delegation, Sen. Luther Cifers and Tammy Mulchi, as well as Del. Tommy Wright and Del. Tom Garrett all pushed for the bill in the Assembly. 

The goal of the new law is to streamline the Medicaid process for local pharmacies, especially independent ones. It will create one single, state-contracted Pharmacy Benefits Manager for Medicaid. Rather than seeing pharmacies deal with multiple departments or contacts in an attempt to get reimbursed for Medicaid patients, there will just be one central hub they work with. No more dealing with multiple companies or groups tied to specific pharmacies or insurance operations. 

And other states have seen impressive results when making the switch, claiming they cleaned up a lot of waste. 

West Virginia reported saving $122 million in the first year after making the switch. Ohio officials, meanwhile, claimed the state saved $245 million in one year; Kentucky said it saved $283 million over two years and Texas said it saved $438 million in two years after making the switch.