MEDLEY, Fla. — Navarro Discount Pharmacy has opened a fulfillment center for prescription medications under the name Navarro Health Services.

Executives say that centralizing the filling of many of the thousands of prescriptions the chain handles every day will make the company’s pharmacies more efficient and allow pharmacists to spend more time with with patients.

“The goal of the facility is to shift the pharmacy workload of maintenance, automatic refills and delivery of prescriptions to the fulfillment center facility, giving our registered pharmacists more time to serve patients,” says Albert Garcia, executive vice president and president of Navarro Health Services. “The facility provides additional consultations related to patients’ medication therapy regimen, adherence and potential side effects, thus ensuring patients receive world-class care.”

Garcia says the central filling process is seamless and allows patients to order their prescriptions in person, via telephone or online while decreasing wait time at the store for all new and acute prescriptions.

Located at its corporate headquarters here, the fulfillment center facility includes a 40-person call center for incoming and outbound pharmacy inquiries.

The company says that state-of-the-art robotics, a radio frequency identification tagging system, a conveyor belt, biometrics and a bottle capper streamline the fulfillment process while providing best-in-class quality assurance.

Meanwhile, Navarro has begun offering vaccines for shingles and pneumonia. The pharmacies had previously only done flu vaccinations.

“As a community pharmacy, we are very pleased to be able to offer these expanded vaccinations for adults, educate customers, and improve their health and well-being,” Garcia says. “Our certified pharmacists have undergone extensive training and are extremely knowledgeable about shingles, pneumonia and the seasonal flu, illnesses that disproportionately affect the elderly in our community.”

The ability to provide patients with the pneumonia and shingles vaccines is a result of the Florida Department of Health’s recent regulations allowing certified pharmacists to administer both Zostavax — a onetime vaccine that can reduce the risk of shingles in people over 60 — and the pneumococcal vaccine Pneumovax.