INDIANAPOLIS — Pharmacy benefit manager Medco Health Solutions, Franklin Lakes, N.J., reported this week that it will build a 318,000-square-foot automated mail-order pharmacy here, slated to open in early 2009. The company expects to invest more than $140 million and to hire over 100 pharmacists as well as electrical and mechanical technicians, managers and warehouse specialists. The company plans to train its pharmacists as condition-specific experts. "With advancements in science and technology blazing a path of personalized medicine, we can no longer take a shotgun approach to pharmacy," said Kenneth Klepper, Medco president and chief operating officer. "To that end, Medco has created condition-specific resource centers staffed with hundreds of pharmacists who receive specialized training in specific chronic conditions, such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease and asthma. This focus on one chronic disease state enables these specialist pharmacists to better help patients optimize their health." Medco's mail-order pharmacy business received an additional boost when the Federal Employee Program awarded a contract for its mail-service and specialty prescription drug program for 4 million federal employees, retirees and their families, effective Jan. 1, 2008. "Medco has pioneered the use of computers, robotics, optical scanners and other technologies to create drug dispensing systems which are virtually error-free," Klepper said.

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