Sept. 24--Getting a prescription filled at Walgreens has been taking a lot longer than usual this week due to an ongoing outage of the drugstore chain's pharmacy computer database.
Pharmacists have been filling prescriptions manually since the system went down Tuesday morning, causing delays for customers at all 8,200 Walgreens drugstores across the U.S.
"We have been experiencing technical issues with our pharmacy systems," said Jim Cohn, a Walgreens spokesman. "Our pharmacies are still able to fill prescriptions and process most insurance claims, however some patients may experience longer wait times until certain functionalities are fully restored."
The system is gradually being restored, but thousands of Walgreens pharmacies remained offline as of Thursday afternoon, Cohn said.
Losing access to the central pharmacy database means prescriptions are only on file at the store where they were originally filled. Local Walgreens stores can still share that information manually, but delays are more likely.
Cohn said the outage occurred after overnight maintenance and that the company is "working diligently" to correct the issue, but he couldn't provide a timeline for getting all pharmacy locations back online. "We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause," Cohn said.
For patients running low on medication and far from their home, delays in filling a prescription can be more than an inconvenience, something Cohn said Walgreens is addressing during the outage. "Our pharmacists will make sure that patient is taken care of," Cohn said.
Deerfield-based Walgreens Boots Alliance, the largest drugstore chain in the U.S., processed more than 856 million prescriptions last year, Cohn said.
Walgreens had sales of more than $76 billion during fiscal year 2014.
rchannick@tribpub.com
