SAN DIEGO — Mail-order prescription services often take days or weeks to deliver meds, but Phox, a nascent San Diego startup, has found a way to speed up the process.

The company, co-founded by a hospital physician and not yet a year old, has created an iPhone and Android app for same-day prescription delivery. Users need only download the app, sign up, and snap a photo of their pill bottle and insurance card to transfer refills to Phox’s system. Phox then matches the person with a local, independent pharmacy that will bring prescriptions to the customer’s doorstop, with same-day delivery for meds that require immediate refills and no extra fees.

“Retail pharmacies define convenience by being in your neighborhood, but they want you in your store. The pharmacies are all the way at the back (of stores), which is designed on purpose for you to walk those aisles,” said Amit Gir, Phox’s co-founder and chief medical officer. “When we built this platform, we didn’t just want to solve first-world problems, we wanted to solve real-world problems, meaning anyone from a millennial that just doesn’t want to pick up his or her medications to the elderly who can’t get to those medications.”

Right now, Phox is a primarily app-based system, but eventually the startup plans to contract with caretaker services to better serve seniors without smartphones.

Launched in San Diego in May, Phox now delivers to people across most of Southern California. Unlike Bay Area startups such as NimbleRx and ScriptDash, which attempt to be both on-demand app and licensed pharmacy, Phox instead partners with independent area pharmacies. That means the local outlets do most of the work. They get the orders from Phox, dispense the medication, accept all major insurance plans, manage deliveries with their own fleet of background-checked drivers and even handle billing.

In San Diego, the startup is partnered with Community Medical Center Pharmacy, which has nine area locations and can get medications to San Diego patients all over. To deliver to Los Angeles and Riverside patrons, Phox works with Ace Medical Pharmacy and The Medicine Shoppe.

“These independent pharmacies, they’re not that big, but they’re efficient. They want new business … but they can’t afford to market across the city or other ZIP codes, and they don’t have the ability to design their own mobile app or market that app,” Gir said. “Us, being pure software, pure technology, our focus is on that experience of using an app to get your medications.”

Plus, as primarily a go-between, the company is never privy to customers’ sensitive health information, nor does it need to worry about most of the regulatory complexities associated with being a pharmacy.

There are, of course, some drawbacks to Phox’s middleman approach, some of which contradict the on-demand convenience consumers have come to expect from apps. Partner pharmacies must call patients to verify customer identity and handle payments, for instance. Then, there is matter of getting a new prescription added to Phox, which requires the user to instruct his or doctor on where to send the prescription.

But Gir and his co-founder, Puneet Jain, believe by taking a low-tech, app-only approach they can bypass the time and costs associated with building their own pharmacy. Plus, they plan to automate more of the system with time.

Even that formula could prove problematic, however, if the nation’s largest drug stores decide to get hip to the delivery business. In November, Walgreens, for instance, partnered with same-day delivery startup Deliv to provide customers in Dallas with prescription delivery for a $5 fee. Similar deals could make business difficult for Phox, which is currently self-funded by its two co-founders and earns referral fees from partner pharmacies.

Gir, however, remains confident that the prescription delivery space is still wide open to small upstarts like Phox.

“We don’t anticipate Walgreens or CVS will ever jump on to pure same-day medication delivery because of unit economics,” he said. “It would be very expensive for them to do that, and they want people in their stores.”