The Doctor Comes to You

Submarine maker Electric Boat hopes to trim health-care costs for itself and its workers by opening a pharmacy near its Quonset Point production yard.

With prescription drugs accounting for 20 percent of Electric Boat’s health-care costs and increases coming every year, company officials said yesterday that they need to put a lid on that spending. They see the pharmacy as a logical extension of the other health and wellness programs Electric Boat already sponsors.

“This is part of an integrated health-care approach,” said Alvin J. Ayers, director of health, wellness and disability benefits for Electric Boat.

A division of General Dynamics, Electric Boat employs about 2,000 people at the Quonset Point facility. The pharmacy is intended to serve 5,000 EB workers, retirees and their families.

“This availability of health care is an issue of increasing importance to us and our employees,” said John P. Casey, EB’s president. “The cost savings are key to our program.”

The company hired CHD Meridian Healthcare, a unit of I-trax Inc., to run the Electric Boat Family Pharmacy. CHD Meridian operates 230 health-care centers, including 30 pharmacies, for companies around the country.

“Having a healthy work force creates a more productive work force,” said Frank Martin, CHD Meridian’s chairman. “Their core competency is making submarines, it’s not being pharmacists.”

Casey and Martin talked about the initiative yesterday during a short ceremony marking the pharmacy’s opening.

Squeezed between a day spa and a breakfast restaurant on Post Road, the pharmacy is a no-frills affair about the size of a living room. There is a small selection of over-the-counter drugs on shelves by the front door and an area for handling transactions.

Absent are the makeup, greeting cards and toys that fill the aisles of retail drugstores. There are no models staring down from promotional posters; no photo kiosks; no milk; no bread.

“You don’t walk past potato chips, you don’t walk past cigarettes, you don’t walk past candy bars,” Martin said. Instead, the operation offers its clients the chance to get more personalized advice on medications and health-care matters, he said.

CHD Meridian keeps costs down by buying prescription drugs in bulk and passing those savings on to its customers.

Electric Boat already encourages generic-drug prescriptions through a tiered co-payment plan. Co-payment for generics is $10; for “preferred” brand drugs it’s $20; and, for “non-preferred” drugs, it’s $35. Co-pays are cut $2 at the Electric Boat pharmacy.

Pharmacists will work with physicians to allow generic drug substitutions, which are cheaper, whenever possible.

Ninety-day prescription supplies are available and the co-payment discount is $6 for those.

Employees who don’t get their health coverage through the company can only buy over-the-counter medicines at the pharmacy, and workers do not have to get their medications through it.

The company rented the Post Road locale, just south of Quonset Point, because of security issues at the shipyard, Electric Boat officials said. They said getting retirees and family members in and out of the facility would be difficult.

The pharmacy will soon start a delivery service to bring medications to workers at Quonset Point.

The company leased the space for two years as it tests the concept. It could extend the lease if the pharmacy proves effective and possibly open a second one in Groton, Conn., where it employs nearly 7,500 at its shipyard on the Thames River.

“This is a pilot for us,” Casey said. “I’m more interested in the long-term effect.”

Source: The Providence Journal
Original Publication Date: October 3, 2007