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The Walgreen Company, bracing for potentially hundreds of thousands of customers to switch to another pharmacy when the new year begins on Sunday, is introducing a national plan it hopes will minimize customer disruption from its contract battle with its pharmacy benefits manager, Express Scripts.
For customers who want to remain, Walgreen’s plan includes a special discount in January to customers for its prescriptions savings club. For those moving on, Walgreen has staffed up 24-hour call centers and instituted computer changes to permit the transfer of multiple prescriptions to other pharmacies in the customer’s network.
Express Scripts and Walgreen have been battling over payment issues for months. Because Walgreen has been unsuccessful at persuading most of their customers who have their drug coverage managed by Express Scripts to switch to another pharmacy benefit manager, called a P.B.M., come Sunday hundreds of thousands of customers will have to pay more for their drugs or switch to another pharmacy.
“Even as much as we have communicated this, a lot of folks don’t know what a P.B.M. is or what Express Scripts is, so we want to make sure we are helping patients through this,” Walgreen’s chief executive, Gregory D. Wasson, said in an interview. “There are hundreds of thousands of patients across the country that are going to be inconvenienced, and frankly, they are going to be upset. They are upset because they don’t want to be leaving Walgreen’s and they are looking at ways to stay with us.”
Walgreen, based in Deerfield, Ill., is the nation’s largest pharmacy chain with more than 8,200 outlets in the United States. Its retail stores operate under the Walgreen’s and Duane Reade names.
Though those enrolled in Express Scripts-managed drug plans will have better coverage and pay less by using another pharmacy, Mr. Wasson believes discounts Walgreen will offer through its prescription savings club will be competitive on generic drugs and most therapeutic categories.
Walgreen is offering promotional pricing of $5 for individual membership and $10 for family members from Jan. 1 to Jan. 31 to be in the program, which offers one-year discounts on prescriptions. Normally, membership is $20 a year for individuals and $35 for families. A telephone number, 1-800-Walgreens, and the company’s Web site, Walgreens.com, will offer Express Scripts-related information.
Walgreen said last week that negotiations with health plans and employers resulted in retaining about 10 million of the 90 million prescriptions managed by Express Scripts that were filled in the fiscal year ended Aug. 31.
Express Scripts said Friday that it, too, has been working to minimize disruption of its customers who have used Walgreen’s pharmacies but expects most to have their prescriptions filled at other pharmacies.
“An overwhelming number of our clients are moving forward without Walgreen’s,” an Express Scripts spokesman, Brian Henry, said in an interview. “The feedback from clients and members is that they are moving, planning to move or have moved. We have been working with clients and reaching out to members for months.”
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