Pharmacy Access Crisis Is a Care Access Crisis
The Pharmacy Front Door Series, Part 1
For too long, healthcare has treated the pharmacy like the end of the process.
A prescription gets written. A patient shows up. A medication gets dispensed. Process complete.
In busy homes, in rural America, in communities where the nearest physician is more than an hour away, the local pharmacy is often the most accessible healthcare touchpoint someone has. It is where people go when they are worried. It is where they ask questions they never bring to a doctor’s office. It is where trust already exists, and where care often begins in a very real, practical way.
Local pharmacies are the center of care in many communities. That is why I believe the pharmacy access crisis is a care access crisis.
The numbers are hard to ignore.
Independent pharmacies are closing at a rate of more than one per day, and the pressure on the ones that remain keeps building.
By the numbers
- Roughly one independent pharmacy lost every day in 2023 (NCPA)
- A $103 billion U.S. pharmacy market in 2024, yet the lowest gross profit margin in a decade
- 326 more pharmacies closed in under 10 weeks after PBM reform was dropped from the December 2024 spending package, 237 of them independent
- Nearly 1 in 8 U.S. neighborhoods now qualifies as a pharmacy shortage area
- 100M+ Americans live in a federally designated primary care shortage area
These are not just business closures. They are healthcare access events.
When a pharmacy closes, a community loses more than a convenient pickup point. It loses a trained healthcare professional who knew its patients by name. It loses a place where someone could walk in without an appointment and get guidance on a symptom, a medication, a next step. It loses one of the most trusted and most practical touchpoints in the entire healthcare system.
The closures are not random. Independent pharmacies are more likely to close than chain locations, and the risk falls hardest on low-income communities, the same communities already carrying the heaviest burden of limited access.
Telehealth helped. But it did not solve this.
I want to be direct about something. Telehealth has expanded convenience. It created real value for a lot of patients. But federal and academic research on telehealth adoption has found the same pattern again and again.
The pattern
Virtual care use grew fastest among people who already had the easiest access, while disparities among rural, lower-income, and minority patients did not close. In some studies, they widened. That finding should give the entire digital health industry pause.
Virtual care without a trusted local anchor still requires a smartphone, reliable connectivity, digital literacy, and a patient who already knows how to navigate the healthcare system. In many of the communities where access gaps are most severe, those conditions do not reliably exist.
The promise of telehealth is real. But it is not fully realized until it is connected to something patients already trust and can physically reach.
The community pharmacy is that something.
Our model
Virtual care works better when it starts at a trusted local access point. When a patient initiates a telehealth consultation through their community pharmacy, they are not navigating an unfamiliar digital system alone. They are starting in a place they already know, supported by a pharmacist they already trust. When the visit concludes and a prescription is issued, it comes back to that same pharmacy, keeping care local, keeping prescriptions local, and keeping the pharmacist an active participant in the patient’s health.
- Telehealth access available at independent community pharmacies nationwide
- Board-certified physicians and providers licensed in all 50 states
- Most visits completed in 30 minutes or less
- Prescriptions return to the same local pharmacy
This is the insight that drove the founding of MyPhysician360, and it is still the conviction that drives how we operate today. We are specifically focused on the communities where access gaps are most severe, including rural America and medically underserved neighborhoods where the local pharmacist is often the most consistent healthcare presence available.
What needs to change
If we are serious about improving healthcare access, not just expanding digital options for people who already have them, we need to stop designing care models that cut out the independent pharmacy and start building models that work with it.
That means treating the community pharmacy as infrastructure, not as a referral channel. It means recognizing that pharmacists are trained clinicians who play an active role in patient health, not just medication dispensers at the end of a process. It means building virtual care systems that strengthen local pharmacy economics rather than compete with them.
And it means being honest about the fact that pharmacy closures are a healthcare access emergency, one that is happening right now, in communities across this country, with real consequences for real patients.
The strongest care models of the future will not bypass the pharmacy. They will build through it. They will treat the local pharmacist as an essential collaborator in care delivery, not a commodity in a supply chain. And they will measure success not just by the number of virtual visits completed, but by whether the people who needed care most were able to access it.
That is the future we are building at MyPhysician360.
I’ll be posting more thoughts and insights into virtual health models, pharmacy trends and other interesting things we see happening in healthcare. Connect with me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethhalkos.
