Drugstore chains rely on pharmacy technicians

— -- When Americans bring prescriptions to their neighborhood pharmacies, odds are the person in the white lab coat who greets them and enters the prescription in the computer is not a pharmacist. Neither, most likely, is the person who puts the pills in the medicine vial.

They're probably pharmacy technicians, in some cases teenagers with no more than high school diplomas. The nation's largest drugstore chains say technicians don't replace pharmacists. But the companies have come to rely on technicians because of regional shortages of pharmacists and steady increases in prescriptions.

Technicians do much of the administrative work pharmacists used to perform, such as prescription data entry, counting pills, filling vials and ringing registers. Depending on your point of view, that's good news, because it frees pharmacists to do more important clinical functions — or bad, because technicians sometimes make mistakes that pharmacists don't catch, and because pharmacists often have little time to help teach the technicians.

The hiring practice does make good business sense: Technicians earn an average of $11 an hour. That translates to about $23,000 a year for those who work full time. Many pharmacists make more than $100,000 a year.

Techs aren't required to be certified

Unlike pharmacists, who are regulated by pharmacy boards in each state, technicians are inconsistently monitored from state to state. The Pharmacy Technician Certification Board guarantees that those who pass its examination meet a national standard. But technicians don't need that certification to work in many states. Just 30 states even mention certification in their rules, and most of those don't mandate it.