Hollis Johnson/Business Insider
For most Americans, picking up a prescription involves a stop by the local pharmacy every month or so.
And while shoppers can go online for everything from clothing to groceries, that isn't the case yet for prescription drugs.
That's starting to change. In June, Amazon announced its plans to acquire PillPack, a small startup that mails prescriptions to people who take multiple medications for a reported $1 billion. The news sent a whole host of pharmaceutical and drug-wholesaler stocks tumbling at the time.
So we decided to take a firsthand look at PillPack's prescription service to get a sense of how it works, and to better understand how it could fit into Amazon's future healthcare ambitions.
My journey started through PillPack's website, where I input some information about myself and set up an account.PillPackThen, it was time to plug in my pills. I don't have any prescriptions, so I skipped ahead to vitamins, picking a multivitamin and an omega-3 supplement and an iron supplement I later removed.PillPack
Then it was time to pick out my dispenser. For an extra $29, I could get a premium dispenser in different colors, but because I was only testing PillPack out for a month, I went for the disposable version.PillPack
After that, I got sent to my prescription landing page, which showed that my account was processing. Later that day, I got a call from a PillPack representative asking if I had any questions. The rep said that it may take some time for my prescriptions to sync up. If I had multiple prescriptions that had different refill times, it may have taken extra time for all of them to sync up and show up in my monthly dispenser. Because I was getting vitamins, PillPack billed me directly for those, and the charge didn't hit my card until a week before my box arrived.PillPack
A few weeks later, the pills arrived in an unassuming brown package.Lydia Ramsey/Business Insider
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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