Adherence Case Study: LTC Rx, a Medicine Shoppe Pharmacy

Paul Winger of LTC Rx has served his community since 2007 by delivering care through his two retail pharmacies and one long-term-care pharmacy. The majority of his patients are residents in group homes or long-term-care facilities who are administered their meds by a CNA or a nurse.

Winger’s business philosophy is to tailor pharmacy services to meet patient needs. He’s been able to improve the patient experience by offering prescription medications in strip packaging, allowing patients to take their meds accurately and on time.

LTC Rx was previously using a competitor’s strip packaging system that was not meeting its needs. According to Winger, “The machine would jam, and quite often it didn’t drop pills correctly. Sometimes it would crush pills.”

The manual review and checking process was also cumbersome and Winger was looking for an alternative. “It used to take us three hours to manually check each strip package with our previous machine. The RapidPakRx™ has cut our checking time significantly—now it takes about an hour.”

Winger was also unable to change NDC’s without purchasing a new canister at a cost of $200 each. In addition, he was hampered by the inability to use more than one NDC in the same strip.

LTX Rx chose the RapidPakRx over the competition because it’s an all-in-one machine with built-in vision inspection. He says, “The RapidPakRx produces a strip and has the image waiting for you to check. It’s a seamless process. It also costs less than the competitors’ two machines that would be required to do the same job, one to produce a strip and one to check it.”

Winger added, “Also, the imaging is really wonderful. We’ve got a big screen TV so we can quickly and easily check the pills on there instead of looking at tiny white pills and a strip package manually. The checking is much easier and it’s more accurate.”

The non-NDC-specific cartridges also helped make the decision an easy one. Winger says, “With the universal cartridges, we just swap them out. We can use any NDC we want. We can even use two NDCs in the same strip package, which could not be done with the previous machine.”

LTC Rx, a Medicine Shoppe Pharmacy, is committed to the idea that quality pharmacy care means that patients get the prescriptions and medications they need, along with the care and personal attention they deserve.

Paul Winger, pharmacist and owner of LTC Rx in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, has made a career out of helping long-term care facility patients adhere to their medication. He remains dedicated to providing helpful and innovative resources that increase the health and wellbeing of his surrounding community.