Charles Walgreen, founder of the drugstore chain, was an ambitious young pharmacist on the south side of Chicago in 1901. When a customer phoned in a prescription, Walgreen would take down the information and then continue his conversation with the caller. After a while, the customer would say, “Excuse me for a minute, there’s someone at the door.” Who would that someone be? A delivery boy with a package from Walgreens. It was the caller’s prescription. Walgreen wasn’t satisfied with meeting expectations. His goal was to astonish, and he excelled at it.
Walgreen and his team had other innovative notions about doing business. A Walgreens soda fountain manager is credited with having invented the malted milkshake. From a tiny base, Walgreens has grown to where it now employs 179,000 people and generates over $47 billion in annual sales. Today, there are well over 5,000 stores.
In fact, a friend once joked to me that Walgreens isn’t as much in the pharmacy business as they are in real estate. They have more good locations than anyone.
Behind Walgreens remarkable growth has been an insatiable appetite for staying ahead of change. “There are no fixed rules for business success,” pharmacist founder Walgreen told Time Magazine nearly 70 years ago.
What Charles Walgreen believed about business and the drugstore industry is equally true of the pharmacy profession. There are 230,000 pharmacists in the United States. What do pharmacists share in common with other high-wire professionals like air traffic controllers? Neither can afford to get it wrong. The very lives of customers are squarely in a pharmacist’s hands.
Vast Quantities
The annual volume of outpatient prescriptions filled is enormous: about 2.8 billion. That’s nearly 10 per each American. An increasing number of prescriptions may be handled in semi-automated ways through the mail. Flesh-and-blood pharmacists, however, remain an incredible resource to interpret a mind-boggling amount of information. And pharmacists are classic information workers who need to stay on top of change. There is, of course, an unending flow of new prescription drugs each year. Pharmacists also need to unravel the rapidly morphing world of over-the-counter drugs.
At the end of 2006, the American Pharmacists Association noted that human events were underscoring the role “of pharmacists as both effective gatekeepers and competent clinical practitioners.” For example, “Congress combated the meth epidemic by moving [certain] products behind pharmacy counters nationwide.”
Pharmacists are bright people and their roles will doubtless grow. And pharmacy has been a great career avenue for women. Four percent of pharmacists were women in 1950. Today 44 percent are and, last year, 65 percent of all pharmacy graduates were women.
What can the average person learn from a pharmacist?
Read precisely. Not only is the number of prescription drugs multiplying faster than bunny rabbits, the similarity of names — especially new drug names — has become a new health hazard. In the drug industry, the problem is dubbed the “look-alike, sound-alike” syndrome.
Don’t be bashful … Ask questions. It’s estimated that thousands of people die each year because the prescription they ultimately take is not the one the doctor intended. There are many reasons, but most of them range from bad handwriting to bad listening somewhere in the chain from the physician’s brain to the patient’s body.
Watch out for MEGO. Beware: My Eyes Glaze Over. No pharmacy prescription can ever afford to be routine. Pharmacists will tell you that it’s as crucial to watch a refill for accuracy, as it is to monitor a new order.
Mackay’s Moral: Delivering just what the doctor ordered can make you the best reliever in the bullpen.
Harvey Mackay is president of Mackay Envelope Corp. and a nationally syndicated columnist.
