Waterloo druggist promotes pharmacy ownership

Source: wcfcourier.com

Nov 25, 2018  | By: Pat Kinney For The Courier

WATERLOO — Bob Greenwood says Rabbi Sol Serber was his most constructive critic.

The late longtime leader of Sons of Jacob Synagogue would call the Waterloo pharmacist frequently.

During Greenwood’s years on the Waterloo City Council, Serber would urge Greenwood to improve his posture at televised council meetings so he looked poised and alert. Serber kept little turtle statues around his home, and urged Greenwood to follow their example and “stick his neck out” every once in a while.

Greenwood followed his mentor’s advice. Thirty years ago, Greenwood stuck his neck out when he left the pharmacy he’d been working at for a decade to run his own independent drug store.

Now, Greenwood’s done it again. He’s mentoring aspiring young independent pharmacists — not just the mechanics of filling prescriptions, but the nuts and bolts of running a business.

Over the last 18 months, he’s had pharmacy school graduates perform a one-year residency through the University of Iowa.

Greenwood’s first resident, Wartburg College and University of Iowa pharmacy school graduate Rob Nichols, now helps Greenwood mentor other young pharmacists.

Nichols, an Ottumwa native who played football at Wartburg, is working for Greenwood full-time and hopes to get his own independent pharmacy when the right opportunity presents itself. He also majored in business, and is saving for the day that can happen. With Greenwood, he’s also working with other fifth-year pharmacy and post-graduate students obtaining field experience.

Greenwood is trying to stem a decades-long decline in independent pharmacies by promoting entrepreneurship in the field. Nichols is one of his best examples of that effort.

“He’s surrounded himself with some of the best pharmacists around the state,” Greenwood said. “So he set himself up to be successful through hard work. And just paying attention. He knew who he had to meet. He was active in the student pharmacy programs both and Iowa and at the national level,” even starting a student chapter of the National Community Pharmacy Association in Iowa City.

“I would say in the last 15 years we probably lost 300 stores,” Greenwood said, where 850 independent pharmacies may have existed when he entered the field. He named at least a half-dozen independent pharmacies in Waterloo-Cedar Falls alone that no longer exist.

The University of Iowa started the pharmacy residency program. While Greenwood’s affiliation is a fairly recent development, over time he’s been very supportive. He’s hired about six to 10 graduates of that program.

Nichols said the program encourages talented students from Iowa “to stay in Iowa, and with that education, to understand the importance of giving back to the community.”

“We want to encourage entrepreneurship, ownership,” Greenwood said. “We have to train these (pharmacists) to backfill these rural communities,” Greenwood said. “Dyersville. Cherokee. Rural areas.”

Greenwood told of one instance in which a small-town pharmacist ready to retire searched five years to find a young qualified pharmacist interested in taking over his store.

Nichols said he decided to enter the pharmacy field late during his undergraduate education at Wartburg; He worked at Meyers Pharmacy in Waverly and became active in professional associations.

“I kind of fell in love with the profession,” Nichols said. “At that point I decided to pursue not only just being a pharmacy technician, but I wanted to pursue the path of being a pharmacist.” He worked as a technician during pharmacy school. He graduated from Wartburg in 2011.

Eventually, he was admitted to pharmacy school at Iowa.

“When I got on there I took on some leadership roles, kept me involved within the profession,” he said. He worked at a pharmacy in Denver operated by Greenwood.

Greenwood was president of the National Community Pharmacy Association at the time Nichols started a student chapter at Iowa. Nichols then worked with the university so Greenwood’s business would become an accredited site for the residency program, emphasizing pharmacy ownership.

“In pharmacy school, you learn everything there is to know about the medications. But in residency, you learn how to take care of people,” Nichols said.

He said his business background guided his decision to focus his residency on ownership.

“And having Bob as a mentor, learning the ins and outs of the business of running a pharmacy, managing a pharmacy, was just an added benefit of me being at this site for a residency,” Nichols said.

His residency concluded in June, and Greenwood hired him full time. He’s working with new pharmacists coming into the residency program at Greenwood.

He was one of just three African-Americans in his pharmacy class at Iowa, and pharmacy mentors who are minorities are rarer still, he said.

For his efforts, Greenwood and his business are receiving an Iowa Trailblazer award from the Coalition to Build a Better Community in Iowa, an organization created by local automobile executive Jeff Zaputil to recognize innovation and initiative in local entrepreneurship.

Greenwood “inspires others to take charge of their own destiny,” Zaputil said.

How Pharmacists Can Stay at the Forefront of Patient Care in an Evolving Market

Source: pharmacytimes.com

Amazon recently announced its entry into pharmacy through the acquisition of PillPack, a service that delivers medications, presorted in adherence packaging, to a patient’s home. The announcement has the pharmacy profession and the pharmaceutical industry debating several questions around the deal’s impact on local pharmacies and the role of the pharmacist in this process. At last estimate, the burden of nonadherence on our healthcare system exceeded $300 billion in direct and indirect costs, with approximately 50% of patients not taking their medications as prescribed, indicating a clear opportunity to mitigate related barriers to improved adherence.

While convenient access to medications certainly aids adherence, and could be facilitated by the PillPack acquisition, the deal stands to disrupt direct pharmacist-to-patient contact and the essential role of the community-based pharmacist within the healthcare continuum. Convenience of medication delivery is not a panacea for resolution of nonadherence and falls woefully short in addressing other critical aspects of addressing medication-related problems including unanticipated medication interactions, gaps in care, cost challenges, lack of patient education, lifestyle incompatibilities, and others.

Rather than focusing on the PillPack acquisition by Amazon as a threat, pharmacists should consider this as an opportunity to reassess the value that they bring—the existing patient care services, tools, and technology that equip them to deliver patient-centric, personalized care. Whether employing data analytics to more efficiently identify needed interventions, adherence packaging, or medication therapy management, pharmacies can enhance their service offerings to differentiate their practices and keep patients at the center of care.

Leveraging Adherence Tools

Pharmacists have long differentiated themselves with patients by stepping up to help with the confusion around managing multiple medications, and monitoring health issues. By using technology to streamline patient communications, and offering adherence tools, such as multimed blister cards, that can be customized to each patient, pharmacists can ensure they are not edged out by the online retailer.

This is especially true when patients experience care transitions. From one care setting to the next, they need the pharmacist as a local resource to help ensure smooth transition, and guide them on their path to better health outcomes. Research has shown that pharmacists are specially qualified to fulfill this role, helping to address concerns, and reduce medication errors that might not always be evident. The one-size-fits-all approach that Amazon is developing circumvents the role of the local pharmacist, and is not designed to meet the individualized needs of patients with unique health concerns.

Enhancing Pharmacy Care for Better Results

As our nation’s most accessible healthcare professionals, pharmacists serve as touchstones of care in communities all across the country, offering patient-centered, personalized, and coordinated care. Emerging data-driven solutions provide pharmacists with tools they need to increase their value through targeted clinical engagement, enabling them to further improve health outcomes, reduce healthcare costs, while offering a level of patient convenience that rivals Amazon-PillPack.

Centralized, actionable data specific to managing patient engagement is essential to improving care while reducing costs across the care continuum. For this reason, healthcare needs a system that not only provides convenience related to medication access—as this Amazon acquisition aims to do—but also keeps the pharmacist regularly connected to the patient to evaluate medication-related health needs on an ongoing basis, communicating as needed with patient and prescriber regarding medication adherence, potential medication changes or dosage adjustments, side effects, drug interactions, needed vaccinations, and more.

The coming months will reveal changes that result from the Amazon-PillPack deal. In the meantime, pharmacists should take this as an opportunity to amplify their value to further differentiate their practices, ensuring that their role will not be diminished by this new venture. By staying connected to their patients and implementing tools that help to expand their service offerings and improve patient care, today’s pharmacists will reinforce their own essential role in the care continuum, now and in the future.