#lead tech problems

Y’all. It is hard to find good help. When I say hard, I mean extremely difficult.

The last 3 technicians my manager hired have all struck out. Of course, they never let me sit in on the interviews and they pretty much hire anyone off the street, so I’m always given a surprise when they walk in the door for their first day.

Tech #1: Much older woman (which there is NOTHING wrong with that, it’s just a given that anyone older that’s never dabbled in a field will have a longer learning process ahead of them. Plenty of times for me, it’s been worth it, because I’ve had some kick-ass techs come out of it), never worked in pharmacy. Claims she was a bank teller previously, so I’m under the assumption that she is meticulous and won’t have problems counting, which is wonderful.

Wrong. Not meticulous. Doesn’t remember half of what I told her 5 minutes prior. Had a nervous breakdown counting tablets.

We’re counting prescriptions, and her next order was for #180 glipizide tablets. She starts counting, gets to about 45 and loses her shit. Leaves all the tablets on the tray, throws down her spatula and says “I CAN’T DO THIS! I need to get some fresh air, I’m so overwhelmed.” She storms off and goes outside, didn’t see her for about 20 minutes.

She comes back and the first question she asks me is, “How am I supposed to go about counting 180 tablets?!”

In order to prevent myself from giving a smart-ass answer (just count it?), I asked “Can you re-word the question so I can give you an appropriate answer?”

“How am I supposed to count to 180? Do I do 90 and 90, 60 60 and 60?”

“It doesn’t matter. Whatever you want.”

She lasted 2 months.

Tech #2: First day, my thought was “She looks... Off.” Her behavior was strange. To keep from saying too much, the short story is that she confides in me that she was once addicted to pain killers. Three days later, she comes in tripping and falling. Drug test was not clean by any means necessary. She lasted 3 months.

Tech #3: She was fantastic! Absorbed info like a sponge (and retained it), great with patients, all was great. One day, she says “I have to go to the bathroom” and it turned into an eternal bathroom break. Never to be heard of again. She lasted 10 days.

I could just be the only one out here that has heard of this, but don’t people know that discussing religion or politics in the workplace is a recipe for disaster?

We have a new staff pharmacist, and she’s been quite... interesting? to work with. I may save the irritating actions for another post, but the main issue that the pharmacy staff, as a vast majority has, is that she is very loud and opinionated on her political stance... to the point of taunting, mocking, radical statements, etc. There’s nothing wrong with having an opinion -- everyone is entitled to their opinion(s) -- but knowing that recent times have become rather tense, it simply does not seem like a great idea to discuss your views.

It’s known that if you state your opinion or stance on any issue, there is always going to be someone in opposition. And there certainly is in my pharmacy. I don’t share my views either way because it’s not going to help me count or type prescriptions any more efficiently. I’m here to do my job, so I just play “Switzerland”. But this particular pharmacist has made very extreme, unsolicited comments that have caused an extreme divide in our work place, which I wouldn’t expect anyone to react in a civil manner is. We work in very close quarters and we around each other often. We’re already having issues working as an efficient team with being short-staffed. How does this help us be any better? It just doesn’t.

There’s no written rule within the company I work for that states that this kind of thing is not allowed, so it’s challenging to rectify. My coworkers vent to me about their frustrations; some are upset with her comments because they perceive them as crude, while others just feel it’s not necessary. I brought it up to my pharmacy manager, and their resolution was “I'm just going to lead by example, and hope she catches on.” It’s been about two months, and nothing has changed. I feel like my hands are tied, as anytime I find a resolution when my pharmacist can’t come up with one, they think I’m stepping on their toes and then I find myself having a “sit-down” on why I went over their head.

Fellow pharm friends. Especially those in some sort of supervisor/department head position (pharmacy manager, lead technician, etc.). Have you ever thought you’ve seen just about every scenario of someone billing something improperly that has costed a patient (or the business) in some way/shape/form that you think, “Nothing else could be worse?”

But then... it does?

I understand that some employees don’t really think about the cost of medications or the cost on the pharmacy when a billing error is made. And it’s understandable in some cases because it may not necessarily be your job to really think about it. But when someone catches a billing error that, of course, then has to be resolved, it can be a major loss to the pharmacy. More importantly, that error is a major loss to the patient.

I have been at this new pharmacy as a supervisor for less than 5 months. A customer, that I have never interacted with, comes through the drive thru to pick up some prescriptions. Before I go to get the prescriptions, I let her know that one of the medications has gone up tremendously due to the elimination of our low-cost generic list (and drug manufacturers, but I wasn’t going to get into that). The patient, understandably, wasn’t cool with it and said she was going to switch pharmacies after this fill. I said “I can always just bill it to your insurance, and I can get you the price.” Little did I know that this suggestion was going to open up the largest can of worms.

“Haven’t you guys always been billing my insurance? It’s Medicare-D.”

I said I had to look at her history, so I looked at the last two months of transactions. Nope, we haven’t. “Do you have your insurance card on you so I can take a look at it?”

She hands me the card. I look at her file. Yup, we have it. It’s been in here for years (her card is one of the very few where the billing numbers haven’t changed by a digit), but we’ve just decided to bill a discount card for the hell of it. I went back 3 months and looked at all the transaction notes just to see if there was a reason as to why we were doing that. No explanation.

“Ma’am, looks like we do have it. For some reason we’ve just been billing a discount card.”

“YOU MEAN TO TELL ME THAT YOU HAVEN’T BEEN BILLING MY INSURANCE AT ALL?!” “No, ma’am.” Now, I have a pissed off customer on my hands. I fixed the prescriptions that she had ready and the bill dropped by $35-40. She was very appreciative of my efforts (thankfully) and asked “Why did it take you to realize that something was wrong this entire time?” I didn’t want to answer the question bluntly so I just said I wasn’t sure, but I told her I would take the time today to re-bill all her claims and call her with the refund. She left frustrated, yet happy, and was expecting my phone call.

So I got to work on my “project”, thinking it was just the last 3 months that we didn’t use this card.

Nope. All of 2016. Okay, I can manage that.

And 2015. I’m breaking out in hives.

And 2014. Are you fucking kidding me. Where are ya, Ashton?!

The insurance would only let me re-bill the claims back to March 2016, and that by itself was $345 we owed this woman. I felt that at this point honesty was way more important than keeping our sales numbers up, so I manually did the math on all of her other claims. The amount was so huge I had to give an explanation to my store manager and coordinator, get their approval, then get permission from corporate to give this woman her money (which they did).

In total, the pharmacy has sheisted this woman a little over $1,200. And we had to give it back to her in cash. Happiest woman I’d ever seen. And she even gave me a card to show her gratitude (even though I wasn’t expecting anything out of her. I was expecting her to transfer out). Rightfully so, we had to take a major loss on sales. And the company inadvertently gave this woman free money (dollars off the gallon with the excessive amount of fuel points she shouldn’t have received. So, Anti-Kickback Statute also breached. Let me digress). My pharmacy manager was off work until the day she came in for her refund, so they now hate me (more than they did initially) for making our numbers look bad, but I don’t care. Having an honest relationship with patients is more important than the money.

So, take this as a lesson, folks. If you see that your pharmacy has been billing some generic-ass coupon instead of their insurance, speak up about it. Ask the patient if they have a primary insurance. If they do, fix it, get rid of the stupid discount card, and rectify any previous errors. Your boss could possibly despise you for it, and if they do, they shouldn’t have that position.

And you have to write two week’s worth of tech schedules in only a matter of days...