Walgreens’ New Prescription Text Service Is Fast And Pointless
Written by Evan SchumanOctober 13th, 2011
Last Thursday (Oct. 6), Walgreens rolled out its latest mobile feature, which enables its customers to get text reminders of prescriptions that are due for refill, orders that the chain said can be completed "with a simple 'refill' reply." But as another reminder of the challenge of federal pharmacy privacy rules, the text is so restricted as to be borderline useless to the chain's best customers.
The new service, called Refill Reminder Text Alerts, is based on a top-notch idea. The goal is to aid customers who have multiple refills and have had the onus of initiating contact with their pharmacy every time a prescription needs to be refilled, even if they have been consistently refilling the same prescriptions every month for years. Instead of waiting for the customer to call, the chain is initiating that contact and asking with a simple text for permission to refill the order. The problem involves restrictions from the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). It prevents the texts from identifying which prescription it's asking about.
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Our Comment SPAM system is getting very aggressive these days and has been blocking legitimate comments. If you post a comment and don't see it appear within 2 hours or so, can you please send a heads-up to customer-service@storefrontbacktalk.com? Ideally, please include the time you posted the comment. That will allow us to try and hunt for it. Thanks! P.S. We're working on fixing the system, but we don't want to lose any valuable comments in the meantime.
I have strong reservations about the 'individual' certification and posting of that information for merchants. Can you imagine the potential employee poaching that might occur? The implications when competitors can look up how many are certified with each of their competitors? 
-Christine
