What's Happening this month:
April 4th - Closed for Easter
April 24th - Double Loyalty Points
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COVID-19 Vaccine Update:
We are expecting to start to see shipments of COVID-19 vaccine in the coming weeks. We request that you sign up for our waitlist on our website www.centerdrug.com. If you do not have access to the internet, you may call the store at 952-938-2719, option 0, and ask to be placed on our waitlist. To minimize the number of phone calls, we request that you sign up via our website if you can. While Minnesota is opening vaccine eligibility to anyone over 16 years of age starting Tuesday, March 30th, we will give priority to those on the waitlist who are over 50, or who have underlying medical conditions that put them at higher risk. We will also give priority to our existing customers. When we have vaccine doses available, we will call you to schedule an appointment for your vaccine.
Since we are receiving allocations from the Minnesota Department of Health, we do not have a choice as to which vaccine we receive. We do know that our first shipment is going to be the one dose, Johnson & Johnson, vaccine. When we call to schedule an appointment with you, we will let you know which vaccine we will have available for you to receive. As we have stated in previous communications, you should accept the first vaccine that is offered to you, especially since the eligibility requirements have been expanded. We cannot accept requests for specific vaccines, since we must take what is offered to us.
If you place yourself on our waitlist, but you have received the vaccine through another source, please either call, text, or email us to remove you from our waitlist. This will help reduce wasting our time calling people for vaccine appointments, so we can get those scheduled who do need a vaccine. In most cases, we will be calling you to schedule a vaccine appointment within a few days after our phone call since the state of Minnesota requires us to use the vaccine allocated to us within 5 days of receiving it.
Once an appointment has been made for you, please plan on keeping that appointment, or let us know as soon as possible if you are unable to, so that we may call the next person on the waitlist. We do not want to waste any vaccine. Please arrive no earlier than 5-10 minutes before your appointment, so that we can continue to social distance everyone within the store. There will be paperwork for you to fill out when you arrive. If you want, you can also choose to download the forms from our website and fill them out before you arrive. If you want to do that, go to our website www.centerdrug.com and click on 'patient forms' and they will be found under 'COVID Vaccine Registration Forms'. The vaccine will be provided free of charge, but please bring your insurance and/or Medicare card with you because we are allowed to bill your insurance for the administration fee.
After your appointment, please plan on remaining in the store for 15-30 minutes after the vaccination so that we can monitor for any side effects/allergic reactions that may occur. The Pharmacist will discuss this with you before your vaccination.
Appointments will be scheduled during the hours of 10am and 4:30pm Monday thru Friday, as we will be making appointments when we have extra staffing available since we will be filling prescriptions during this time also.
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Prescribe Wellness:
Prescribe Wellness is a program that was started at the end of February. It is an automated call or text that reminds you if you have a prescription that is due/overdue to be filled. If you wish to have these reminders texted to you, please make sure we have your cell phone number on file. If you wish to stop receiving these calls or texts, you can opt out of the program. You can text 'stop' in reply to a text that is sent to you. If you are receiving phone calls, just call the store, or email us, and we will add you to the Do Not Call list.
Our new system does allow us to set up auto-fills for your prescriptions. We can either do all of your prescriptions, or we can just set up certain prescriptions to be auto-filled per your request. When we do this, our system will auto-fill the prescription 3-4 days before it is due, and we will call or text you when a prescription is ready to be picked up.
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Will-Call Texting:
Our system will now text you when your prescriptions are ready to pick up. If you want this service, please make sure that we have your cell phone number on file, and tell us that you wish to receive texts from us. This system will also send you a text reminder if you still have not picked up your prescription 5 days after it has been filled.
If you receive a text about a medication being ready to pick up, but you don't need that medication, please give us a call so that we can return that medication to stock. If any medications remain in our bin and not picked up 10 days after we have filled it, we do have to return that medication to stock per our contracts with the insurance companies. We usually return medications to stock on Saturday's, so if you know you have had a medication sitting in our bin for a while, please call us to let us know you will be coming to pick it up, so we don't waste our time returning medications to stock, only to have to refill it for you when you arrive. This happens most often with medications that your Doctor sends over when you have a physical, and they renew all your meds for the year, as we will usually fill whatever will go through your insurance at that time.
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Curbside Pick-up
Many people have inquired if we are still doing Curbside Pick-up. Yes, we will continue to do Curbside pick-up for as long as people request it. When you use this service, we ask that you have a credit card on file with us, so that we can easily charge your purchases and have them ready and waiting for your phone call that you have arrived. If you are picking up multiple prescriptions, please call or text us ahead of your arrival to make sure that all the prescriptions you want to pick up are ready. When you arrive at the store, please call us at 952-938-2719, option 0, to let us know you are here. We prefer that you call instead of texting when you arrive, since we do have 2 systems that we have to monitor for texts and you will get speedier service if you call, especially during busier times of the day.
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Claeys Candies
We are starting to see the Claeys candies coming back into stock. The company had some manufacturing issues and we had been out of stock on them for quite a while, but we are now seeing them come in again. We don't have all the flavors back yet, but they should be soon.
Also, we have had some interruptions with the Sugar-Free Lifesavers and our supplier. Hopefully those will be coming back in stock soon also. We do monitor the stock status on those weekly and will get them back in stock as soon as they are available to us.
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Allergy Season
Contributed by Intern, Joseph A.
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Thank you!
The entire Center Drug staff would like to Thank you for your support.
We have endured many changes this past year---a new Robot to fill prescriptions, a new pharmacy software system, a new pharmacy app, a new point-of-sale system with new credit card machines, a new phone system, implementing the Prescribe Wellness program, and a new Inventory Control System in the pharmacy, all while learning to adapt to new ways of doing business with everyone per COVID challenges (which had us changing the ways we did things daily for a while).
As with anything new, things didn't always go as smoothly as we anticipated, so Thank you for hanging in there with us through all of these implementations!
We are happy to say, we don't see any more new updates in our future. We will now learn to optimize our new systems to work better for us and you!
Thank you, and it is great to start seeing everyone come back into the store that we haven't seen in a long time due to senior living buildings being 'locked down' for much of the past year. We are also thankful that our staff has remained healthy this entire year and is now vaccinated, and we are here to help you in any way we can!
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Check out our app! If you use a smartphone or tablet and would like another way to refill your prescriptions, then please download it today.
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Upcoming Double Point Days:
(Be sure to mark your calendars)
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Hopkins Center Drug | 913 Hopkins Center Hopkins MN 55343
952-938-2719
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