Rx Updates - January 2024

To our valued Acorn pet owners and clients:

As we approach our 30th year serving the Davis community, we want to thank you for your continued support. Whether inside or curbside - and through unforeseen challenges - we love caring for your pets and family.

As you may have noticed, we began transitioning our clinic to a digital platform four months ago. We are now in the final phase of this transition after nearly three decades of paper records! During this shift to our new system, we have had to find ways to best facilitate service and navigate this change. The following are some changes that will take effect on January 1, 2024. Please read carefully, as this will impact your pets’ prescription and medication refill process.

Effective January 1, 2024, we will discontinue the authorization of all external medication requests from online pharmacies, including Chewy, Petco.com, PetMeds, and Costco. The reasons for this are as follows:

• We receive dozens of these requests throughout the day—sometimes duplicates of previous requests—and this is not where we want our skilled staff to focus their time and energy. Instead, we want them to spend that time helping you and your pets with appointments, surgery, and hospitalization needs.
  
  
• We do not employ a dedicated full-time pharmacy staff to make and take these phone calls, online requests, and faxes.
  
  
• There have been instances of online pharmacies selling unauthorized or counterfeit products; we want to ensure patient safety when we authorize a medication.

We fully understand that those of you who are used to getting prescriptions from online pharmacies may find this change inconvenient. We have two options for those of you who would like to continue purchasing products online:

1. We are happy to provide you with a written prescription to continue to purchase from online pharmacies. A hard-copy prescription will be ready for you to pick up within 3-5 business days after a request and we will call you when it is ready to be picked up.
   
   
2. We will have our own online pharmacy, VetSource, stocked with products authorized by the manufacturers that do not carry the risk of counterfeit. These items can be shipped directly to your doorstep and are competitively priced—sometimes cheaper than online pharmacies with coupons provided by the manufacturer.

As always, there is no change for our in-clinic prescription refills; they typically require 24-72 hours to process.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation with this change. Purchasing through our online pharmacy SUPPORTS US—your independently-owned (non-corporate), small business! Please know that you’re shopping LOCAL when you buy from our online pharmacy and your patronage helps support our Davis community.

Please call us with any questions or concerns at (530) 753-7580. We appreciate your patience and support as we fully move on to our new system. 

Warmly,
Your Veterinarians and Staff at Acorn Veterinary Clinic