Lifelong AIDS Alliance expected a warm reception from community
leaders when it announced plans to rent its basement to MOMS Pharmacy,
a national chain and a relative newcomer to Seattle. After all, MOMS
specializes in HIV and AIDS medications. It dispenses medication in
time- and date-stamped packages that are designed to help patients
stick to their drug regimens, which can exceed 20 pills a day. Clients,
public-health officials, and health-care partners all lauded the
proposal.
But the prescription came with side effects.
Local health-care providers worry that by exclusively partnering
with Lifelong, MOMS could use the nonprofit’s good reputation to grab
the lion’s share of Seattle’s HIV pharmaceutical market, harming local
businesses that have been working with Lifelong’s clients for
years.
“To bring a corporation that stands to gain financially into the
fold of Lifelong, and to expose your clients and my patients to such
marketing trickery, seems to stretch the bounds of ethical standards
beyond their breaking point,” wrote Dr. Robert Killian, a physician who
serves primarily LGBT patients, in a letter to Lifelong.
But MOMS and Lifelong say they want to better serve clients, not
impact local businesses. “If [patients] have existing support and a
pharmacy in place, we don’t want to take that away,” says Tony Luna, a
MOMS spokesman. On the other hand, Lifelong spokespeople have said the
agency may combine its meal-delivery program, which provides food to
about 900 clients a week, with deliveries of medications from MOMS
pharmacy. Those patients would be most likely to abandon their local
pharmacists in favor of more convenient service from the national
chain.
Pharmacist Guy Forte, who cofounded SeattleMeds, a pharmacy that
opened last year and serves a couple hundred Lifelong clients, says
sardonically that he wishes his pharmacy could be tied into
Lifelong’s food delivery service. “They didn’t even consider that this
might be hampering our business,” he says.
From the perspective of a nonprofit, though, Lifelong’s decision
makes sense. The primary commitment of the organization, which serves
thousands of people around Seattle, is to its clients. A recent report
from the San Francisco Department of Public Health showed that homeless
patients who had a nurse caseworker and
date-stamped prescriptions
from MOMS Pharmacy fared significantly better than before the program,
and better than patients in other HIV-treatment programs. “If you have
HIV, you have to stay on medications 95 percent of the time or the HIV
breaks through and you lose,” says Lifelong executive director David
Richart, who adds, “Clients love the fact that they can come in to get
food and meet with a case manager or a treatment counselor; adding this
pharmacy is just one more piece.” 