What is the VISIONS: The Future of Pharmacy Initiative?
Pharmacy deserts are communities with limited access to pharmacy services. In Chicago, these deserts are most common in segregated Black, Latinx, and low-income neighborhoods, exacerbating health disparities and negatively impacting health outcomes.
To confront the challenges posed by pharmacy deserts, the SCRPTS Lab at the UIC Retzky College of Pharmacy and the UIC Institute for Healthcare Delivery Design (IHDD) partnered to stage Visualizing Innovative SolutIONS (VISIONS). VISIONS: The Future of Pharmacy, is a workshop series convening both Illinois pharmacy industry experts and Chicago pharmacy users from South and West Side neighborhoods.
The Future of Pharmacy Workshops
VISIONS convened three pharmacy industry expert workshops and two patient workshops, utilizing the participatory human-centered design process to create intervention concepts directly responsive to the challenges created by pharmacy deserts.
EW1
August 6, 2025
Getting to a robust and nuanced understanding of what we mean when we say things like “community pharmacy” and developing shared language to help us through the rest of the co-creation process
PW1
August 13, 2025
Developing a shared understanding of what we expect when we go to community pharmacies as well as what community pharmacies should be “more” like, and why.
EW2
September 3, 2025
Articulating the status quo and finding points where things need to change and/or where interventions could occur
PW2
September 10, 2025
Reimagining what pharmacy can look like 10- and 50- years into the future.
EW3
September 24, 2025
Leveraging the work done in the previous two workshops to get our hands dirty and really get into solution-finding and brainstorming
The Future of Pharmacy Concepts
The VISIONS concepts address a wide range of challenges. They work at multiple levels to reconfigure pharmacy to better serve communities affected by pharmacy deserts. Each concept offers a co-created vision that aims to improve both health outcomes over the overall patient experience.
Pharmacy Careeer Pathway
What if we cultivated the home-grown pharmacists we need?
A program that augments local workforce by guiding local youth towards pharmacy careers starting in high school and offering continuing support during their professional training
HealthLand
What if a visit to the pharmacy could spark all-around health?
A community health ecosystem under one roof that delivers healthcare and social services while building trust through a hyper-local approach
Quick Pick
What if medications were never more than blocks away?
A system of trusted, hyper-local, distribution points and delivery that places pick-up in patients’ hands
UpPharm
What if every pharmacist got engagement with their community right?
A state-supported professional development program that prepares pharmacists to enter underserved communities and fosters continued engaged and accountability to those they serve
Back to the Future
What if pharmacy centered the patient rather than retail?
A re-imagining of the traditional pharmacy store to satisfy patient needs both for convenience and for slowed-down provider interactions.
Project Partners
funding
The VISIONS Initiative was made possible by generous support from Henri R Manasse, Jr. and family, the Systems-based Collaborative Research for PatienT Safety Lab, and UIC Retzky College of Pharmacy.