JOINT BASE SAN ANTONIO-RANDOLPH, Texas –
The 230,000 beneficiaries within the San Antonio Military Health System will have the choice to pick up prescription refills from nine locations across San Antonio by calling the new SAMHS combined line, 292-9995, starting Feb. 25.
The combined line will allow patients to easily get refills at either Army or Air Force sites, regardless of where they originally received their prescriptions.
Automated commands will ask patients to select their desired refill pickup site at Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston, JBSA-Lackland, JBSA-Randolph or JBSA-Camp Bullis.
From there, patients decide to stop by the following places: Air Force Village Pharmacy (near Lackland), Brooke Army Medical Center Outpatient Pharmacy, Camp Bullis Pharmacy, Fort Sam Houston Community Pharmacy, Fort Sam Houston Primary Care Pharmacy, Lackland Commissary, Lackland Satellite Pharmacy, Randolph Satellite Pharmacy and the Wilford Hall Clinic Pharmacy.
"One consideration of any pharmacy benefit design is access, and by facilitating refill medication access to our beneficiary population at any one of our nine Army or Air Force pharmacies, despite where the prescription was originally filled, is an enhancement to that benefit," Army Col. Peter Bulatao, Southern Regional Medical Command pharmacy consultant and Fort Sam Houston Department of Pharmacy chief, said.
Offering SAMHS beneficiaries a choice resulted from the continuing effort of military treatment facility leaders in the city focusing on their No. 1 priority: the customer.
"The SAMHS Refill Prescription phone-line consolidation project is the perfect example of the SAMHS pharmacy team hearing the suggestions of our DOD patient beneficiaries on how to improve our collective pharmaceutical care services and bringing those recommendations to reality," Air Force Col. Jeffery Johnson, 59th Medical Diagnostics and Therapeutics Squadron commander at Lackland, said.
Refill medications will be ready to take home when beneficiaries arrive for a scheduled pickup. New prescriptions, however, will begin to be processed once they check in at an MTF, Air Force Capt. David Lang, Randolph Pharmacy staff pharmacist, said.
"Because we have mirrored all the MTF formularies in San Antonio, if you are a patient impaneled to an MTF provider, you could still see that MTF provider but pick up your medication at another MTF," Lang said.
The current JBSA call-in line for refills, 292-7000, will eventually be phased out and the new combined refill number will appear on prescription labels Feb. 25.
"This is another example of the pharmacy directors from the three military treatment facilities in JBSA working together to find a way to make pharmacy operations more convenient for the patients," Air Force Lt. Col. Derek Larbie, Randolph Pharmacy Flight commander, said.