Reading off my batch of Dash pods from Walgreens, lower casing the whole thing (it is all upper case) to be polite:
“omnipod dash pods (5 pack) mis ins
qty 30”
Check it, double check it and refuse it if it is wrong. The guys on the front line aren’t equipped to deal with this but we can teach them. It really does help not to go apeshit while doing this. Out here in Grants Pass people get their prescriptions for Insulet products filled just right because I did the work to make it so. Feel proud.
This story drives me crazy. I’m very familiar with this as I’ve been diabetic since 1986 and I’ve had out and out battles for years, since the diabetes supply manufacturers began outsourcing to those terrible DME distributors.
My family migrated to New Zealand in July 2022 and while I was nervous about my diabetes supplies and there were bureaucratic hoops to jump throug to get things set up, everything is fine now. I get a Rx from my doctor (they charge $17.50 to put in a refill order for a 90 day supply of all meds,including pump supplies) and pick them up from my local pharmacy for free. There’s so little hassle, and my heart breaks for those struggling in the broken American system where the trend is to shift more and more of the administrative and financial burden onto the backs of ordinary Americans. It’s completely unethical but I also don’t see any effort being made to fix it.
We have 1 walgreens in town that can sell them (that I have found via insulet). I don’t know why that walgreens is different than all the others. They don’t know either.
I think that I am developing a perspective on all this.
I used to get Omnipod pods at a local small pharmacy who always seemed to go the extra mile providing service on pod refills. Unlike my local Walgreens which had an unfriendly pharmacist and techs who stare at their computer rather than engaging with the customer.
When I switched to Omnipod 5 Insulet sent me to Gentry Health Services, mail order. Gentry has a helpful staff who will sort things out on the phone. If you want to try a mail order alternative, Gentry should be able to help you.
I think it is too easy to mistake a person for a corporation and when we forget that the people we talk to IRL really are people we devalue both of us.
These days the only people I talk to are online, like you guys, or on the end of a telephone. Even my doctor only does video. It’s hard to remember what real people are like.
I suspect the only thing that matters is that every person is just the same as me, but it’s hard to remember that.
Its not the people. Its the system. I know that people were making an honest, sincere effort to fill this Rx. The Doc must have called it in 20 times.
I got up early every morning for a month to make phone calls. I spent four weekends driving from pharmacy to pharmacy trying to find someone to fill it. I spoke with every involved party. I took time off work trying to fill it. I kept a public written log of my experience (with musical accompaniment) over the final month of trying to fill the script on the interweb. It included direct communications with all companies involved. A diabetic from MIT tried to help. I know that the script was virtually unfillable.
They are under contract with me. Its not good enough to just say, “we don’t know what’s wrong. We don’t know why we can’t fill this script” It’s medically negligent and it happens all the time. People have to be accountable to uphold their end of contracts because the alternative is risk to public safety, risk to me, risk to other people. My time is valuable. I’m a diabetic. I’m not gonna live that long. It seems a reasonable question after 6 months, “Will I live long enough to see this script filled?”
The pharmacist told me, “Don’t try to understand. No one understands how this works. I don’t understand. No one does. You will NEVER understand.”
You have to really try to understand, though, in order to understand that the process is broken. You always start by giving it the benefit of the doubt. That’s how debugging complex systems works when people are involved.
