Jimenez Julien
Founder of MLJ, SASU, publisher of PillRoute, and the person who answers when you write to the support address at the bottom of this page.
Why PillRoute exists
I did not come to pharmacy from healthcare. I came to it from logistics, building scheduling and dispatch tools for small operators who were losing money in the gaps between one job and the next. A pharmacy owner in a town of eleven thousand people asked me to look at his delivery run because he could not work out why two drivers and one van were costing him more every quarter. I spent three days behind his counter with a notebook, and by the second afternoon it was obvious that the delivery run was not the problem at all. The problem was upstream: his maintenance patients were due on twenty eight different days of the month, so the counter produced a trickle of bags that no route could ever make efficient.
He knew about medication synchronization. Every independent owner does. He had tried it twice and abandoned it twice, because the arithmetic of short fills is unforgiving and because the call volume in the alignment month buried his technicians. What he needed was not a philosophy of appointment based dispensing. He needed software that would work out the bridge quantities, hand his staff one clean call list, and then take the bins off the will call shelf and turn them into a route in the right order. Nobody was selling that to a single store owner at a price a single store owner could pay. The systems that did some of it were sold to chains with a procurement department.
So I built the first version for him, in his back room, over eleven weeks. He ran it on a hundred patients. Then his buying group heard about it, and three more stores wanted it, and at some point it stopped being a favor and became a product with a name, a price and a support address. PillRoute has been running in production since 2021. It is used by 412 independent stores in 38 states, and every one of them was signed after a conversation, never after a form fill on a comparison site.
What two years behind counters taught me
The first thing I learned is that pharmacy software is judged in seconds, not in features. If a technician has to click four times to log the outcome of a refill call, she will write it on a sticky note instead, and your data is gone. The second thing is that the pharmacist in charge carries legal weight that a software vendor cannot wave away. Every short fill PillRoute proposes is a proposal, never an action, and it prints the reasoning so a licensed professional can approve or reject it in one look. The third thing is that drivers are staff, not couriers. If the phone app is slow at the door in February with gloves on, it does not get used, and the signature record you promised your auditor does not exist.
I also learned to be careful with promises about money. Owners have been told for years that a piece of software will fix their margin. PillRoute does something narrower and more honest: it removes labor that produces nothing, it stops fills being manufactured for people who are not ready for them, and it shortens the delivery day. Those three things show up on a profit and loss statement, but they show up as a few hundred dollars a month in a small store, not as a transformation. I would rather say that plainly on the demo call than have you find out in month four.
How I work with pharmacy operators
Every new customer gets a call with me or with the person who will run their onboarding, and we look at their real panel: how many maintenance patients, how many delivery days, what dispensing system, what the driver situation is. If the answer is that PillRoute will not help, I say so on that call. Roughly one in six conversations ends that way, usually because the store has almost no delivery volume or because the owner wants a full dispensing system rather than a layer on top of one.
After launch I stay reachable. Support mail comes to me before it goes anywhere else, and I read all of it. Feature requests are logged with the name of the store that asked, and when something ships I write to the people who asked for it. Twice a year I spend a week visiting customers in person, because a video call will never show me the physical shape of a will call shelf or how far the technician has to walk to reach the fax machine.
Experience and expertise
- Fourteen years building scheduling, dispatch and route optimization tools for small operators in retail, field service and last mile delivery in Europe and the United States.
- Two years of on site observation across independent community pharmacies in Tennessee, California, Wisconsin, Ohio and Texas, including full shifts at the dispensing bench and on the delivery van.
- Direct authorship of the PillRoute short fill model, the sync call script and the controlled substance custody line, each reviewed by practicing pharmacists in charge before release.
- Working knowledge of HIPAA obligations for a business associate, adherence measures including proportion of days covered, and the operational realities of plan edits and refill too soon rejections.
- Founder and director of MLJ, SASU, the French company that publishes PillRoute and holds the customer contracts.
How this product is built and maintained
PillRoute ships small changes often, and every change that touches dispensing logic is reviewed by a licensed pharmacist before it reaches a customer account. We keep a written standard for three things: clinical claims, numbers and language. A clinical claim on this site or inside the product must be traceable to a published measure or to our own customer data, and if it is our data we say the sample size. Numbers are recalculated every quarter from the live customer base rather than being frozen at whatever looked good in a launch post. Language avoids scare copy about audits and inspections, because owners deserve to make this decision calmly.
Editorially, everything you read on pillroute.com is written by me and reviewed by one of the pharmacists who works with us. Testimonials are published with the full name, role, business and city of the person who gave them, with their written permission, and they are removed if the customer leaves. There is no advertising on this site, no affiliate arrangement with any dispensing system vendor, and no third party analytics cookie. The contact form is the only place the site collects anything at all.
On the product side I am accountable for uptime, for the security posture of the hosting, for the accuracy of the short fill calculations and for the accuracy of what we say in public. If any of those slip, the fix and the explanation come from me rather than from a support macro.
Published articles
Everything below was reported and written for Counter to Curb, the PillRoute magazine on independent community pharmacy, and reviewed by a practicing pharmacist in charge before publication.
- How to Build a Med Sync Program in an Independent Pharmacy
- Pharmacy Delivery Rules: DEA, HIPAA and State Board Requirements
- In-House Driver vs Courier vs Mail: Pharmacy Delivery Costs
- Pharmacy Adherence Math: PDC, Star Ratings and the 80% Line
- Nine Delivery Mistakes That Cost Independent Pharmacies Money
- Pre-Route Checklist for Pharmacy Delivery Before the Van Leaves
- A 90-Day Med Sync Rollout at a Two-Pharmacist Store
- PBM Reform, NADAC Pricing and Where Reimbursement Is Headed
- A Winter Ride-Along on a Rural Pharmacy Delivery Route
Contact the author
Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com about anything: a demo, a technical question about your dispensing system, a complaint, a correction to something on this site, or a request to have your data removed. I answer within one business day, and there is no assistant filtering the inbox. If you would rather start with a structured conversation, the request form on the home page reaches the same place.