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Tim Hayes vows the wave from behind the counter and chats with customers about their summers up North won't come to a screeching halt.

The change in ownership of Harrington's Pharmacy, a fixture in the Professional Arts Building near downtown Naples for as many years as longtimers can recall, doesn't spell doomsday.

Those folks wistful for the milkman and the butcher who knew your favorite cuts of meat can still come in the pharmacy and lean on his shoulder, so to speak, when yet another ailment sets in.

There still will be home deliveries of prescriptions. There still will be home billings. But add new technology to your service, if you're so inclined.

"We will remain the same," Hayes said. "We're not changing the name, we're not changing policies."

Hayes' sale of his four pharmacies in Southwest Florida to a Fort Worth, Texas-based public company, digiMedical Solutions Inc., was completed last month after being in the works for more than a year. He also sold two pharmacies he owned in Dallas to the company.

The sale does mean a further dwindling of independent pharmacies in Collier County. The alternative would have been closing eventually, but not due to the public perception that chain pharmacies are pouncing the life out of the independents, he said.

Anthony Souffle / Daily News

Tim Hayes, former owner of Harrington's Pharmacy, talks with sales representative Sarah Register on Friday afternoon at the pharmacy near the corner of Immokalee and Goodlette-Frank roads in North Naples as Gordon Shafor comes in through the back door. Hayes recently sold the stores to a Fort Worth company. However, he is staying on as an operations consultant.

Rather, his pharmacies would not have survived against the economic squeeze from pharmacy benefit management companies, which oversee the prescriptions component of health plans for the insurance industry. The focus of pharmacy benefit management companies, called PBM's, is to reduce costs to the insurance industry and that means reducing reimbursement to pharmacies.

"They cause the financial struggle for pharmacies of all kinds, regardless of chain or independent," he said.

Under digiMedical's ownership, Hayes is now a consultant in pharmacy operations and is helping with expansions in Southwest Florida which lack independent-minded pharmacies that provide the extras not offered at chain-owned stores. For instance, a location in San Carlos Park is in the works.

"We want to be more of a factor in that area because there are no other independents," he said. "We want to position our pharmacies every 10 miles or so."

Ten years ago, he opened a Harrington's near Southwest Florida Regional Medical Center in Fort Myers as his first Lee County site.

In Collier, besides the original location near downtown Naples, there's a Harrington's near North Collier Hospital and a pediatrics pharmacy located at Dr. Diana McLaughlin's pediatrics practice, also near North Collier hospital.

Besides expansion plans, a key new service offered from digiMedical is digital prescription service and a call center for patients. The aim is to better align the doctor, the pharmacist and the patient.

Called digiRX, the system involves participating physicians using the company's digital service to send prescriptions to the pharmacy in seconds. They use either a hand held digital device or computer to electronically send prescriptions to the pharmacies.

"So the patient can come right here (to the pharmacy) from the doctor's office and pick it up," said David Lee, chief executive officer of digiMedical.

When a patient needs a refill, he or she calls the company's authorization center and speaks to a person during normal business hours, as opposed to leaving a message at a doctor's office and waiting for a call back. The company's employees take charge and digitally seeks out the doctor's refill.

"If the doctor gives re-authorization, we transmit it to the patient's pharmacy," Lee said. "It doesn't have to be Harrington's."

The intent is to make it easier for customers to get refills and the system reduces the stream of phone calls into doctors' offices, Lee said.

"We handle a lot of the footwork," he said. "We have 15 doctors in this market fully utilizing (the service) and probably another 10 or 15 in the que."

Another component is how refills are handled for controlled substances, namely pain killers, which require a physician's hand written re-authorization on a prescription pad.

"We go to the doctor's office to pick up the hand copy prescription," Lee said. "It is an added service unheard of."

The benefit to the physician is security that the prescription won't be altered in the event it gets in the wrong hands, he said.

"Patients can still elect to pick it up but most legitimate patients say 'go ahead and pick it up,'" he said. "They want it filled."

Hayes said electronic or digital prescribing will become standard practice for physicians in time and will be the savior of independent pharmacies.

"It provides a resuscitation for the independent pharmaceutical industry because businesses like mine can grow by providing these extra services," he said.

He anticipates the chain stores will join the movement toward digital or electronic prescribing between doctors and pharmacies but the chain stores will lack the call center component for the patient.

"The chains would have to add many people to do what we are doing," Hayes said. "It would require years to ramp up."

Lee anticipates the independent pharmacies will have a resurgence, similar to how community banks are making a comeback.

"I think the independent pharmacy is bringing the community back to the community," he said.

• • •

Hayes purchased the original Harrington's Pharmacy in 1994 from Fritz Harrington who went to medical school and is now in practice in the Professional Arts building. Harrington purchased the pharmacy in 1975 from the original owner, Hayes said.

"It was one of the first independents at the time," Hayes said.

Today, the one location has about 10,000 customers although no one is deleted from records until there's been no prescription activity for a few years. The pharmacy has 1,000 house accounts where customers are billed to their homes and the pharmacy does 25 to 30 home deliveries each day.

There's no delivery to Marco Island or Immokalee and during season because of traffic, the distance for deliveries has to be narrowed. The pharmacy has had the same delivery man, Ernie Gloster, for 31 years.

"He has been a fixture around here," Hayes said.

The pharmacies have never been at a loss for loyal customers. All told at the four Southwest Florida locations, Hayes has 25,000 customers.

"There are a certain percentage of people who do not want to do business with a chain pharmacy," he said. "It is part of their upbringing, part of the value of a pharmacist who wants to take more time with you, what I call value added services, which increases the value of business but doesn't cost you anything."

The home deliveries is one example, so is his willingness to order or stock items that customers can't find at the chain pharmacies. He also has customers who have him mail their prescriptions to their Northern homes.

"Our local phone number is also our 800 phone number," he said.

And customers can still come in, plop their empty prescription on the counter and walk away with a refill minutes later.

"It's a touch of the old, old-style business," he said.