She loves to help pharmacy patients save money

When L’Tanya Wright hears that a customer at the Rutledge Tower Pharmacy at the Medical University of South Carolina is having trouble paying for medication, the advanced pharmacy technician offers to try to help find a remedy.

“I get a kick out of it,” she says. “I love to make sure people are able to pay for their medicine, because drug prices are pretty high.”

For example: “We had a child from Myrtle Beach whose dad was paying hundreds of dollars a month for his medication. The child was too young to qualify for a coupon for that medicine.”

Wright told the father how to deal with that. “'Give the company a call. If he’s able to take the drug, why can’t he use the coupon?’ He sat out in the waiting room and called. I said, ‘Tell them you want to activate the coupon.’ He got it to go through. Now he’s been getting it for free for three years.”

It’s the kind of customer service that led her coordinator to nominate Wright for Care Team Member of the Year at MUSC Health. “We got a letter from a patient talking about her excellent customer services skills,” Jamie Von Dohlen says. “That wasn’t the first time I’d heard that about her. I know how great she is, but I want everybody to know all the good things she’s doing for our patients. She always goes above and beyond.”

To Wright’s surprise, she won. “I’ve never been nominated before. I just do what I do.”

In a time when high drug prices are the subject of discussion and legislation across the country, what Wright does is highly valued by patients. The one who wrote the letter about Wright described going to the pharmacy and finding that the bill for medication after eye surgery was more than $215. “Ms. L’Tanya Wright worked with me to find coupons to get my bill down to $142.34,” he wrote.

She later helped him get another prescription for $4 instead of the $60 that a pharmacy chain wanted to charge him.

Wright knows what it’s like to be in her customers’ shoes. She got interested in the pharmacy field when one of her sons was hospitalized with asthma. “I stayed in and out of the hospital with him and there were so many different drugs. I wanted to learn about the drugs that were available for him.”

She already had degrees in math and computer programming when she began studying to become a pharmacy technician. She earned her diploma from Trident Technical College in 1999. Last year, she added another item to her resume: a Master of Science in Health Informatics degree from MUSC.

“I’d like to continue to do something new within pharmacy with my degree,” she says. In the meantime, Wright continues to work on billing and insurance at Rutledge Tower, always listening for ways to help. “I sit on the side by the register so I pretty much hear everything,” she says. “That’s our goal — for our patients to get medication and not be without it.”