Norwood News

About a month and a half after Leroy Pharmacy opened its new location on 204th Street, employees walk around the store talking to customers and consulting with patients at the pharmaceutical counter. One customer yells over the counter, “Hey Jay, looks like you’re still going strong!”

Jay Dhaduk, a pharmacist for 20 years who has worked at Leroy for 10 of them, smiles back, clearly excited about what the change will bring to his place of employment.

“That store was too tight,” said Dhaduk, of their old location about a block away.  Now that Leroy has moved to the 4,500 square-foot store (formerly a Blockbuster and before that a Woolworth’s), its staff can start offering new services that are important to the community, he said.

And the move also coincides with a more significant change in Leroy’s services. They were one of a handful of Bronx pharmacies picked to participate in a pilot program by Medicaid called Medication Therapeutic Management, or MTM, that seeks to build better communication among patients, health providers and pharmacies.

Some patients use multiple doctors and multiple pharmacies, and problems can arise with duplication or interaction of the drugs. The purpose of MTM, as it is stated by Medicaid, is to use “supplied MTM software” to make sure those issues are taken into account when pharmacies are filling out prescriptions.

 “Some pharmacies just fill prescriptions, put it in the bag and hand it to the customer. We don’t do that here,” Dhaduk says. “We don’t fill prescriptions blindly.”

In the new space at Leroy, a small private room is set aside off to the right of the drop-off counter. Here patients who have been flagged by Medicaid for being multiple-drug users will meet one-on-one for 30 minutes to an hour with a pharmacist about their family medical histories, current prescriptions and health habits.

“It’s a lot of pressure on us and Medicaid will be looking for results constantly. They are looking for certain small, small things that these guys may end up in the hospital for,” Dhaduk said. “Medicaid wants to avoid that. It said, ‘Hey, that’s too expensive, we’d rather keep you in the pharmacy than keep you in the hospital.”

Leroy’s owners also hope to re-open the old store down the road and use the space for yoga  and nutrition classes to help sustain patients’ well-being outside of the check-up room.

And keeping Leroy’s customers happy and healthy is very important, Dhaduk said, because Leroy has been around for over 20 years and has been a landmark in the Norwood community.

“Every single person that walks in here we know by their name, their families, their brothers and sisters, everything,” Dhaduk said. “We know the whole puzzle, the whole tree—every family has a tree and every tree we pretty much know. We don’t want to lose one, because if you lose one, you’ll lose the whole tree.”

Ed. Note: The Grand Opening of the new Leroy Pharmacy, located at 314 E. 204th St., between Hull and Perry avenues will be met with celebratory events and free vaccinations on-site. It is tentatively set for Sept. 15.