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Multiple Rite Aid pharmacies located in and around the city of Rochester began closing their doors a few weeks ago, leaving the area vulnerable to becoming a pharmacy desert. In response, the Rochester Pharmacy Access Coalition is working to ensure residents maintain access to essential services.
Rite Aid filed its second bankruptcy filing on May 5. It had initially sought bankruptcy protection in October 2023 in a voluntary Chapter 11 filing, emerging roughly a year later as a private company.
As a result of the new filing, hundreds of Rite Aid locations nationwide are shutting down. The list includes 12 stores in Monroe, Ontario, Wayne, Genesee, Wyoming and Yates counties, affecting 128 employees.
Rite Aid closures add to Walgreens’ announcement last November. Five area Walgreens stores closed, leaving many community members inconvenienced and unable to access their medicines easily.
“In this moment of a national chain’s disinvestment, community leaders in Rochester stepped forward, as they have so many times before,” Rochester Mayor Malik Evans said at the time. “Rather than viewing the closure as a setback, they saw it as an opportunity to rally together, leveraging their collective vision and resilience.”
The Rochester Pharmacy Access Coalition—University of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester Regional Health, Trillium Health and Jordan Health—was formed when Walgreens announced its closures. While coalition members function independently with their own patients, they keep each other updated with new information and developments regarding pharmacies and health care in the area. Currently, they are working to help patients transfer prescriptions and prepare for the Rite Aid closures, which began June 4 and will continue through the end of the month.
“Both times, with the Rite Aid and Walgreens closures, we basically knew the same time the public found out that the stores were closing,” explains Christopher Woodring, Trillium Health’s chief pharmacy officer. “We might have had a little intel that that might have been happening a little bit earlier than the actual press release, but specifically with Rite Aid, we kind of already developed the playbook because of the previous Walgreens closures.”
The first step for Trillum, he says, is to review medical data and determine where doctors are sending prescriptions, to understand who will be affected by the Rite Aid closures. Then, those affected patients must be contacted through phone calls, emails, or MyChart messages, and directed to other pharmacies, whether that means Trillium’s own in-house pharmacy or another outside pharmacy that might be more convenient.
Woodring says 500 of Trillium’s 15,000 patients will be affected by the Rite Aid closures. Around 20 percent of those 500 patients are “high-impact users of those stores,” he says, specifically mentioning the Rite Aids on North Goodman Street and North Clinton Avenue.
“Those stores were not small in volume. They’re in densely populated areas,” Woodring notes.
The challenges that arise in Trillium’s plan of action are getting in touch with the patients and making sure they receive the warning that their pharmacy is closing.
Gary Williams, Jordan Health’s chief business officer, agrees. He says the main hurdle is having up-to-date contact information for patients.
More than 300 of Jordan Health’s patients will be impacted by the Rite Aid closures, Williams says. For many of these patients, the distance to and from their chosen pharmacies is a significant barrier to accessing care. Jordan Health offers a few solutions, including a pharmacy delivery service. It also employs a Medicaid answering service.
Aside from reaching out to impacted patients and doing their best to ensure all medical information is up to date and transferred to a new pharmacy, the coalition members are working on other approaches to fill the gap created by shuttered pharmacies.
Woodring says that one way to start is within community and neighborhood groups.
“We have some virtual meetings to see how folks in those regions or in those neighborhoods are dealing with the closures, what they may need, educating them on other ways to access pharmacies,” he says.
Woodring believes there is a need for “a multitude of solutions” and that “we’re still at kind of the tip of the iceberg here on how we get this fixed or completed.”
Williams highlights a new advocacy committee within Jordan Health that had its first meeting on June 12. The group is composed of and facilitated by Jordan patients.
“What our objectives are is to really hear the voice of the customer in terms of what their experience has been with Jordan,” he says. “Whatever they want to discuss, we place it on the agenda, and we brainstorm around solutions to better engage our patient population and better serve our patient population, including those who may or may not be in the room.”
Williams asks the community to spread the word about the closures and resources to help.
“Help people understand we are here for the community,” he says.
Alefiya Presswala is a student at Ithaca College and a member of the Oasis Project’s second cohort. Beacon contributing writer Jacob Schermerhorn created the data visualization for this article.
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