An Unintended Consequence of the Amazon PillPack Deal
Last month Amazon announced it was acquiring PillPack, an online pharmacy that delivers prepackaged daily dosages of all your medications by mail. The convenience of having prescriptions delivered right to your door has been a selling feature of mail order pharmaceuticals for years, but Amazon’s move into the pharma arena seems to have consumers excited about the possibilities for a little disruption in the industry. According to GlobalData, 54% of Americans polled were happy with the announced deal and only 24% disapproved.
It’s not hard to imagine more and more consumers choosing to have their prescriptions delivered, and for those who take more than one kind of pill a day, having those pills packaged in daily pouches seems like a great idea. Everyone can get behind added convenience, efficiency and lower costs for prescription medications, but you do need to be aware that additional packaging which includes your personally identifiable information and sensitive medical details needs to be securely destroyed to safeguard yourself from dumpster diver fraud.
We’ve written before about the need to shred the labels off your prescription pill bottles. Someone rifling through your recycling bins can easily find mailing labels or discarded pharma packaging that gives them a lot of information about you or your family members. If an identity thief finds your name, your doctor’s name, the drug name, the prescription number, the pharmacy name and whether there are any remaining refills they could be able to intercept future refills or contact your doctor’s office and impersonate you with the intent to commit more serious medical fraud. When you start getting more and more mail order deliveries it can be a chore to peel off labels and run them through a paper shredder. It’s an unintended consequence of the Amazon PillPack deal – the more convenient delivery of your pills might create more frustrations around getting rid of all that packaging. That kind of frustration was the inspiration behind our self-shredding label idea. We’ve made it easier to remove and shred pharmaceutical labels with just the pull of a thread.
Our patented self-shredding label is secure, cost-effective and exceeds HIPAA and FACTA compliance for the destruction of confidential information. This five second animation will show you how it works. We are currently talking with pharma companies about ways to deploy this innovative design in both traditional and mail order pharmacies. If you’d like more information about the self-shredding label or any of our other products, contact us at info@invaluableinventions.com.