Nearly half of the US is on at least one prescription, but the coronavirus pandemic has thrown people for a loop and made picking up medications another in a long list of daily hurdles. Nuro is hoping to make getting prescriptions easier by teaming up with CVS. The company will use its fleet of autonomous vehicles to deliver meds to the curbs of customers who place orders via CVS.com or the CVS pharmacy app. The pilot program will start in June and will serve areas in Houston, Texas.

This service will be free to all CVS Pharmacy customers, and Nuro says that deliveries should take three hours or less. The prescriptions will be safely locked inside the delivery vehicles until the customer proves their identity. The pilot does seem limited, since it’s serving such a small area, but hopefully it will expand to other cities if it’s successful. The company says that it plans to eventually transition from its Toyota Prius fleet to its custom R2 delivery bots in the coming months.

Instacart is expanding Costco pharmacy deliveries to almost 200 locations in Arizona, California, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, New York, Washington and Washington DC. It plans to bring the service, which it started testing in November in California and Washington, to other parts of the country in the coming months. 

You can receive a text notification from a Costco pharmacy when your prescription’s ready, which will include a link to schedule a delivery. After confirming your prescription, you’ll be able to add household goods and groceries to your order — that could be a handy way to save on the delivery fee if your medication costs less than $35.

There are multiple privacy layers to be sure others aren’t prying into your medication history. You’ll need to use both your Alexa voice profile and a personal passcode to access data. Also, any interactions with the pharmacy skill are redacted to prevent someone from simply looking at the mobile app.

Right now, the feature is only available to Giant Eagle Pharmacy customers who install the store’s skill. More pharmacies are coming in 2020, however. It’s safe to say this is part of a considerably larger plan. Amazon is involved in the pharmaceutical world thanks to its PillPack acquisition, and there’s little doubt that it wants to integrate PillPack with its other businesses as closely as possible — it might just be a matter of time before Alexa is refilling prescriptions through Amazon’s own shop. Even if you don’t care for the official store, though, this could make the Echo (or any other Alexa-ready device) a go-to option if you regularly take prescription meds and don’t want to rely on mobile apps to keep track.