Researchers have come up with a tool that employers, benefits advisors and others can use to analyze how easily health plan participants can get to brick-and-mortar pharmacies: a method for identifying "pharmacy deserts" and communities at risk of becoming pharmacy deserts.
The researchers used pharmacy location data from the National Council for Prescription Drug Programs to determine how long it would take 80% of the people in a census tract, or neighborhood, to drive to a pharmacy, then compared that with how long it would take the same people to drive to supermarkets. They defined a census as a pharmacy desert if the travel time to the nearest retail pharmacy was greater than the travel time to a supermarket. They defined a census tract as vulnerable to becoming a desert if people in the tract had just one retail pharmacy that was closer than the nearest supermarket.
About 57 million U.S. residents, or 18% of the total, live in census tracts that are urban deserts, and 8.9% rely on a single "keystone pharmacy" for access, according to the researchers' paper, which was published on the JAMA Network Open website.
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Dr. Walter Mathis, a professor at Yale University's medical school, led the team that conducted the study.
Mathis previously led a team that conducted a similar study that identified supermarket deserts. In the new paper, the researchers suggest that analysts could use a similar method to identify other types of health care deserts, such as hospital deserts or emergency room deserts.
Benefits professionals or regulators could use the researchers' methods to understand the possible effects of drug store shutdowns on an employer's workers.
Pharmacy owners say pharmacy benefit manager cost-cutting pressure is squeezing out many brick-and-mortar pharmacies.
In the past six months, CVS Health and Walgreens Boots Alliance have announced plans to close a total of about 2,050 of their 17,600 U.S. drug stores.
Related: Walgreens' parent acquired for $23.7B by private equity firm
Pharmacies that provide drugs through the mail or private delivery services can help fill the gap.
But, "beyond medication dispensing, pharmacies provide many valuable services that require direct patient interaction, such as the provision of vaccinations," the researchers write. "These services cannot be replaced through online or mail-order pharmacies."
The researchers note that their study has limitations, such as the reliance on comparisons with supermarket access and a lack of information about travel times for people who have no cars and rely on public transportation or help from friends to get to pharmacies.
For the percentage of people living in pharmacy deserts in the five states that the researchers identified as having the worst pharmacy desert problems, see the gallery above.
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Allison Bell
Allison Bell, a senior reporter at ThinkAdvisor and BenefitsPRO, previously was an associate editor at National Underwriter Life & Health. She has a bachelor's degree in economics from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She can be reached through X at @Think_Allison.
