All About Qwark

There was a time when the pharmacy business was more personal. When the friendly neighborhood pharmacy greeted you by your name, answered your questions with full attention and assurance, and truly cared for your holistic wellbeing. And when one was too sick to get out of bed, the young assistant for the pharmacy would hop over to deliver that much needed flu medication

With consolidation of drugstores, we now have pharmacy chains where hapless pharmacists and technicians that are heads-down filling medications with barely a glance back at you. You stand in the line for 20-30 minutes before you get to the counter. You have a few questions but you see how busy the pharmacist is, so you bite your lip and mutter under your breath “I’ll just Google it, I guess”.

And over time, these chains and middlemen (aka Pharmacy Benefit Manager - PBMs) have added layers and layers of complexity to the healthcare system to extract larger profits that makes the price of relatively cheap generic medication vary as much as by a 1000% from one pharmacy to the other and for one patient vs. the other.

We found all these inefficiencies and complications of a fairly simple business model just absolutely ridiculous. And around the same time, we learned about one of our coworkers who suffered greatly as she could not fill her prescription in time because of exorbitant drug prices, and the pharmacy did not check on her or talk to her about alternatives. That made it very real for us, and it hit close to home for us.

That’s when we said “Let’s create a smarter pharmacy with a local pharmacy feel”. This is a pharmacy that brings back the personal attention and care for the patients, that uses modern technology to allow our pharmacists to be humans and focus on patients rather than being pill filling machines, and that makes the affordable medication actually affordable.

We hope that our customers find this passion of ours reflected in our values and our everyday interactions with the customers. We look forward to being your new human-first pharmacy!