Amazon Pharmacy now offers medicine delivery ‘within hours’ in two more US cities

If you don’t feel like running out to a store to get medicine the next time you’re sick, you may be able to get the supplies you need just as fast from Amazon Pharmacy.

Amazon customers in two more cities will now be able to get medicine delivered to their door “within hours,” the company says, in what it hopes will be “the fastest and most convenient service for the home delivery of prescription medications.”

Starting today, the service is available in New York and Los Angeles. More than a dozen cities will have access by the end of the year. Amazon didn’t name those cities but did point out that customers in Austin, Indianapolis, Miami, Phoenix, and Seattle already have access to same-day delivery, while customers in College Station, Texas, can get their medications delivered in under an hour via drone.

And it’s not just for illness medications like the flu or a fever, but medications for conditions like high blood pressure, diabetes and more.

Also: The 65+ best lingering Amazon Big Spring Sale deals still live

Instead of the sprawling warehouses that are popping up all across America, Amazon uses smaller facilities for these deliveries — small format stores stocked with the most common medicines that are closer to where customers live.

Amazon pointed out an example of one such facility in Brooklyn that holds more than 12,000 medications, most of which are of the urgent care variety. Orders for those medicines, the company says, can be processed by a pharmacist and fulfillment team within minutes.

Delivery methods will be different depending on location, Amazon said. In a more populated city, you might get your medicine via a driver on an e-bike or an electric van. If you’re in a more rural area, it might be delivered by drone.

Each fulfillment center will have a licensed pharmacist checking prescription orders, and generative AI and machine learning will be used to help those orders be filled more quickly and more accurately. For example, if a handwritten prescription comes in, Amazon says, AI will run a series of fact-checking tasks to make sure the pharmacist gets clear instructions. No prescription will leave a fulfillment center, Amazon says, without a pharmacist verifying the details.