Alabama Pharmacies

Introduction

This site displays data on pharmacies in Alabama based on publicly available data from the Alabama Board of Pharmacy. The data have been enhanced by adding attributes related to urban/rural classification and aggregation based on counties and primary care service areas. According to an October 2023 article in the Washington Post,

• Pharmacists are often the most accessible health care professional in rural and low-income communities.
• In addition to prescription drugs, pharmacies also offer medical equipment, over-the-counter drugs and food. Many also have self-service blood pressure monitoring machines.
• A rural area can be considered a pharmacy desert if residents are more than five miles from a pharmacy.
• A low-income urban area where residents rely on public transportation can be considered a pharmacy deserts if resident are more than half a mile from a pharmacy.
• One in four neighborhoods nationwide are pharmacy deserts by these definitions
• Pharmacies have undergone a distribution shift since 2014, leaving low-income minority neighborhoods and expanding in middle and upper income white neighborhoods. This shift could worsen long-standing racial and economic disparities in healthcare outcomes.
• Independent, community pharmacies are declining in the face of competition from large chain pharmacies.

User Interface

Our data are displayed in the form of interactive maps and tables. The maps generally have point or area layers that can be added or removed with the layer control on the map. The user can zoom in and out of a map and move about in the usual way. Zooming in reveals additional features such as small towns and then streets and roads. A click on the home button returns the map to its origional location and scale. The zoom-to-area button allows the user to zoom to a selected rectangular area of the map. Clicking on an object in a layer usually shows summary data for that object.

The interactive tables can be sorted by any field, by clicking on the header for that field. The buttons at the top allow the table data to be copied to the clipboard, in tab-separated text format, printed, or downloaded in various formats (tab-separated text, Excel, or PDF). With the search bar, the table can be filtered according to a text string.

In the interactive tables that display geographic point or area data, you can sometimes click on a row to select an object and see the object highlighted in the map. You can select as many rows as you wish. Click on a selected row again to de-select and remove the highlight.

Limitations

The information and data presented in this project are provided as a service to the educational and healthcare communities. Although care was taken in gathering the data at the time of posting, no warranties are expressed or implied as to the correctness or usefulness of the material. Moreover, the project should be viewed as a snapshot in time. Inevitably, the further from the time of posting the less accurate the data will be.