A patient was reunited with their mail-order prescription for a critical medication thanks to a few good deeds. The individual had moved out of their apartment without providing a forwarding address. When the medication was delivered to the old address, Corbin Stephenson, who works for the apartment complex management company, says he was able to locate the packing slip and see it was an important medication for someone on dialysis.
“We had the name of the person, but no address, so we decided to bring it to Alta View Hospital’s pharmacy to see if they could help reunite it,” says Corbin.
Corbin dropped the package off with Mindi Robbins, Alta View’s pharmacy director, who was very busy at the time with the caregiver vaccine clinic.
Mindi Robbins and Diedre Burton
Mindi says, “We don’t normally take ownership of medications from an outside source. But since it was an important and expensive medication, I wanted to help. I knew we were in a better position to locate the patient than the apartment manager.”
Mindi quickly contacted pharmacy compliance. She then asked pharmacist, Diedre Burton, to try to reunite the drug with the owner. One of the challenges, Diedre says, is the patient had a very common first and last name. She also had no idea if the patient had ever been seen by Intermountain.
“I saw the medication had come from a specialty pharmacy and it was a one-month supply of a very expensive medication for a patient most likely receiving dialysis,” Diedre says. “All of this told me that whoever needed it really needed it.”
Diedre did some investigating and amazingly found a matching patient who’d been seen by dialysis services.
“When I called this person at eight o’clock that night, they were so grateful and ready to come get it right away,” Diedre says. “They were actually tied up doing dialysis when I called, so one of our technicians brought it down when they came by afterward.”
Diedre says the missing medication can only be dispensed from a specialty pharmacy via mail order and the person hadn’t realized their address hadn’t been updated.
“It’s a mistake anyone could make,” she says. “I’m glad we could help return it to the right owner.”