Digital Health Community Pharmacy Innovation: HLTH 2024 Podcast Series Part Two

Transcript

Kelli Stovall (00:05):

You are listening to the Global Network of podcasters dedicated to the pharmacy profession. Welcome to the pharmacy podcast network.

Announcer 1 (00:24):

The pharmacy podcast network is excited to announce the release of a compelling three-part podcast series that covers the recent HLTH 2024 conference held in Las Vegas from October 22nd to the 24th. This premier event gathered thought leaders and innovators from across the healthcare landscape focused on addressing pressing challenges and exploring promising opportunities for the future of

Kelli Stovall (00:48):

Health. So it’s been amazing being at this phenomenal conference and what I was thinking last night was I grew up in a smaller town and we had a lake in our town and it was beautiful, still beautiful, and we were very proud of that lake and we were very familiar with that lake and much like the first time I did some extensive travel and I first saw the ocean along the coast of California, it was eye opening, a little bit mind blowing, and I feel like I have that same experience here at the health conference. The pharmacy industry, community pharmacy, independently owned community pharmacy, which has been my career, has been this magnificent lake to see and exist in. Coming to this conference, I have been able to see this bigger ocean, this bigger picture of innovation in healthcare. And what it has left me with is really this desire to progress our independent community pharmacy industry and to exist in this bigger picture.

Todd Eury (02:10):

Kelly, HLTH. Some people say health, I still say HLTH because that’s what they originally started calling it when it was first invented and now they’ve switched to health. But this is my second time here and I’m still overwhelmed. It’s crazy, isn’t

Kelli Stovall (02:26):

It? It’s phenomenal. It, it’s really best conference. I feel like I’ve experienced in many, many years.

Todd Eury (02:36):

The energy, the creativity, the injection of people speaking at all times and dirt stages that are inside the exhibit hall, which makes me feel more part of it than always being separated at some of our traditional conferences. I think there’s something to be learned here from an aesthetics and a feeling and a vibe because they’re practicing, they’re preaching and they’re practicing what they’re executing, which is innovation in healthcare. And I saw pharmacists, we’ve seen pharmacists, IPCs here, obviously representing 2000, 3000 pharmacies throughout the country. How many lives that is going to impact. I’m so proud that you’ve taken the time and you invested to be here because just like you said, it’s going from a pond and a lake that you grew up around and knew like the back of your hand. It’s beautiful. It’s it’s part of the community, but then all of a sudden you realize there’s this whole ocean of opportunity, of innovation, of connection, and I think that’s special. What are you most excited about when you think of application, something that you saw here and how it can pull back and become valuable to the community pharmacy owner?

Kelli Stovall (03:57):

There’s a lot of tech here obviously that ai, healthcare tech solutions, everywhere you turn at the end of that tech solution, at the end of that AI solution, there’s a patient and for health outcomes to be successful, patient engagement is key. So community independent pharmacy excels inpatient engagement. We assess the needs of the patient, customize that care. We have exceptional customer service, which all then leads to a higher patient engagement scale. That patient engagement is critical for any health outcome. I think it’s very exciting that IPC is invested in the industry in this way because for these solutions and these initiatives that we see all around us here to exceed the end user, the patient has to be engaged in them to actually deliver the results these companies are looking for. And I think that’s where independent pharmacies come in.

Todd Eury (05:13):

Absolutely, absolutely. The shift from how a independent community pharmacy operated and knew about it, experienced it 20 years ago. I came in pharmacy in 2004, I remember this, I remember the way that, I’m not going to say it was a simpler time, but in ways it was and generation of revenue to keep your doors open and generation of revenue to invest in something else that the community needs and generation of revenue for the entrepreneurial driven pharmacist, who knows, they have to keep innovating too. That was just conceptual back then when we were talking about, we used to say predictive modeling. We used to say big data, we used to say all these things and the health record wasn’t talking to the pharmacy system and there was no such thing as fire. And now all of a sudden you and I are in this midst. Not to say to the listeners that were old, but we’ve been around long enough to remember where it didn’t exist.

(06:20):

We also remember when it was used just as a punchline and now it’s literally happening. It’s really working. It’s touching patients, it’s driving care, it’s helping pharmacists make money somewhere else other than the prescription fee. But that is the future of pharmacy care. I think of that 2080 rule, 20% of the revenue coming from something other than the 80%, which is prescription fee, right? 10 years from now when we’re here at Health 2034, there will be flipped. It’ll be 80% driven services and treatment plans in monitoring and remote patient care and pharmacogenomics and test kits and all this stuff of the management and the usage of the data to drive better preemptive care. And then also disease state manager.

Kelli Stovall (07:13):

I think the other thing when you were talking about the changes that we’ve seen at our age, if you will, is the constant change and that through the years independent pharmacy, pharmacy industry has seen constant change. Sometimes it feels like it’s a daily basis, right? What’s new today? What’s changing today? What obstacle is there? What innovation is available? I think one of the important things to remember in a situation like this is that we have to embrace that change. We look around, we see all these changes and the industry has to say, okay, yes, we will step into that change rather than resist it. Because when we walk into a situation like this and we see all of these companies that are investing millions, billions of dollars into these technologies, that further patient outcomes, then we have to understand that we want to be in this room. And if we don’t embrace innovation and change in these areas, then we won’t be in this room. I’m so proud that IPC is in this room. I mean, we are the only pharmacy, independent pharmacy network in

Todd Eury (08:33):

This room. We’re in a little pharmacy island over here by ourselves.

Kelli Stovall (08:37):

Yes. Now we can see some big chain names over in the corner, but we are the only independent pharmacy representation here and really proud of that. And we really want to help stores take that step to embrace this innovation and not just be in the room, but be a big impact.

Todd Eury (09:00):

Yeah, let’s get a community pharmacy owner up on stage talking to these physicians, talking to these VC organizations about what future of pharmacy care looks like at the community level, at the mom and pop sitting, the people that have been there for years in their community. How’s that small pharmacy that everybody wants to overlook? How is it the hub of healthcare and the hub of innovation and technology? But it’s doing it in a gentle manner because they’re already trusted. So one of the chains, and God bless the chains, they have to be successful for public health’s sake. I don’t want to see them fail, but the independent pharmacy can move 10 times faster in implementing something. IPC has invested in multi millions of dollars into systems that not only work but are now ready to be connected with other things we’re not allowed to say, but there are some surprises that are coming out of this conference that IPC has staged. I got to see behind the scenes stuff with Ashton and it’s exciting. There’s going to be programs that we’re going to be able to plug into the platform that aren’t IPC owned that our consumer wanted, meaning the consumer wants that program, that health program, and now the platform that they’re already used to can be leveraged to expand their business through these new programs.

Kelli Stovall (10:25):

Oh, it’s exciting.

(10:26):

We’ve, we’ve had some great conversations and it’s been interesting in these conversations, some of those basic, what we see in our industry as really the benchmarks of our industry around our customer service, patient care, total assessment of the whole patient, increased engagement, these providers, these foundations that are looking for better outcomes, they need these things to actually implement their programs to successful outcome. I mean, pharmacies know that like the back of their hand. And so our challenge now is to accept those and make those changes for greater innovation, to bring in those additional solutions that you were just describing into their service model because what they have now and what they’re good at will make the difference. So to combine those two I think is a perfect combination. Absolutely.

Todd Eury (11:39):

Kelly, this has been wonderful to be part of the team. We’ve had a blast here in Vegas at HLTH 2024 and we’re on to Columbus. Here we go. Yes. Be alright. See you there.

Dr. Steve Miller (11:58):

Hey, this is Dr. Steve Miller from First Data Bank. We’re here at the HLTH conference and I’m here with the pharmacy podcast,

Todd Eury (12:07):

Steven Miller, Dr. Steven Miller, first Data Bank. It’s so exciting to see you here at HLTH. Thanks for doing this. Oh

Dr. Steve Miller (12:14):

Yeah, my pleasure.

Todd Eury (12:15):

Alright. First, DataBank is not a stranger to the pharmacy podcast, nor our listeners, we really respect your organization, which you bring to the table, how you alleviate the struggles of our pharmacist in the realm of using data and having it make sense, especially outcomes. So give our listeners a quick update as to what are some of the simultaneous advances that are rapidly revolutionizing the application of clinical decision support, which is known as CDS in a medicine specifically as it applies to medications.

Dr. Steve Miller (12:51):

Yeah, this is my favorite thing to talk about. I came out of Johns Hopkins a year ago where I was an assistant professor and my focus, I’m a pediatric gastroenterologist.

Todd Eury (13:05):

We love pediatricians. Thanks. Shout out to Jenna Quinn, who’s actually here with perfecting peds. Oh yeah. She focuses just on pediatrics.

Dr. Steve Miller (13:12):

Yes, yes, I know her. I got really into the pharmacy decision support space when I was there because as a pediatric subspecialist working with expensive specialty pharmacy medications, I was having a terrible time getting my patients access. I treated and continue to treat. I’m still in practice. A lot of kids with inflammatory bowel disease, that’s Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, and you have to use medicines, oral small molecules or injectables or infusion pharmacy meds that require prior auth. And my patients were regularly being hospitalized because we couldn’t get them the meds in a timely manner. The process was not transparent. It was incredibly painful for us and the patients. And also to be honest, painful for the payers because of their inefficient processes in that context. And with my background as a board certified information focused on human factors engineering and with a lot of coursework and fire and CDS hooks, I took that on as a problem, wrote a K grant application and started a consulting business, which eventually led me to come to FDB about a year ago.

(14:32):

And now at FDB, I get to really spend all of my time focused on this pharmacy decision support piece. So what then are the huge changes in the field that have triggered this revolution in how pharmacy decision support, how medication decision support happens? I think that there are really three things. And what I want to say here is it’s not a future potential revolution that’s happening. We’re mid revolution, it’s happening now. The products that are being used are, have been changed and are continuing to be changed because of these things. So there’s three big things that is fire fast healthcare, interoperability, resource messaging, standard CDS hooks. Those two things come together and they’re sort of mandated by the 21st Century Cures Act. There’s big common data models that allow you to take electronic health record or pharmacy health record data and standardize it and then use it for learning, for revising our knowledge base, for changing how our alerts and decision support trigger.

(15:46):

And then there is AI as most broadly, but more specifically these large language models of their machine learning. Those three things which are all constantly being discussed at health this year and a whole bunch of talks, those are the things that are altering the way in which we’re talking about pharmacy here in which pharmacists receive the support to make decisions about whether a medication is safe to administer, whether the dose is accurate, whether it’s the right medicine for this patient in their clinical situation, and whether the cost of the drug at the point of care, at the point where they’re dispensing or administering it to the patient is reasonable for them with the incredible complex mess of the payer infrastructure in the United States. So those are the things that are changing and they’re hitting pharmacists right now. They

Todd Eury (16:43):

Are. And the scalability need to have technology to have AI maybe using AI to speed up prior authorizations, for example, in even in specialty cases. But what I’m thinking of community pharmacy, I’m thinking of 8,000 plus pharmacies that have disappeared over the last 36 months and it’s causing an issue. Therefore technology is more needed than ever before. We might’ve talked about technology five years ago and said, Hey, this is going to be really cool when this comes out. Now we’re saying this has to work in order for public health to stay at par and in order to move forward. So why is it important for CDS for those clinical decision supports to be patient centered and of course scaling?

Dr. Steve Miller (17:33):

Yeah. So what pharmacists in the ambulatory setting at these smaller community pharmacies or bigger community pharmacies, whatever, they are operating in an information poor environment. They don’t have everything that came out of the electronic health record in terms of information about a patient’s disease state or labs or whatever. They don’t necessarily have a deep knowledge of all of what’s going on with the patient in terms of social determinants of health. They’ve got information about the medications, sometimes limited indication information and insurance information, a little bit of demographics. And so the question is how can a pharmacist take that information and use it to keep the patient optimally safe, avoiding dangerous drug drug interactions, drug food, drug disease, all of this kind of information, the way that it has been done classically is by hitting sort of dumb database tables with information about each individual drug as it’s the decision is made by the pharmacist to dispense it or not.

(18:47):

And then a giant printout is provided to the patient that has all kinds of difficult to understand information to give that what is changing now is that this new generation of pharmacy informatic systems, which FDB my company has one, it’s called Navigo, which is currently being used at almost 10,000, well mid 7,000 pharmacies in the United States. What this kind of next generation pharmacy information system does is groups of medication interactions, drug disease, all of these kinds of interactions by clinical consequence and therefore allows pharmacists to make decisions around which meds to fill, not provide extra counseling to patients about at a much more logical point in their clinical workflow and in a way that pharmacists think, okay, is this going to trigger the patient to have a kidney injury?

(19:56):

Rather than just looking in a drug focused manner, this next generation system looks in a patient focused manner and allows them to first off, get the information at the right point in their workflow at validation or prior to the moment of clicking the dispense, clicking through the dispense in their system. And secondly, provides it in a very patient specific manner. And then the third thing is providing patients health information about their meds in common language in a manner that they can fill it and get a schedule, get information about how they’re going to actually incorporate this into their daily life. That information standard schedules package medication inserts at fifth to eighth grade reading level in multiple languages. We haven’t talked about that stuff, but those things are now possible and are being done. And many pharmacies across the United States, a number of companies are providing this. And FTB is one of them that is really at the forefront of this.

Todd Eury (21:08):

Steve, the evolution of pharmacy care is under pressure because of things that we’ve already kind discussed. So something that is necessary is empowering the individual pharmacist to access a consultant to a group of patients who have been assigned through a Medicaid arrangement, for example. And now we’re seeing the rise of this in my own state, Pennsylvania, in a little town called Meadville, Pennsylvania. Dr. Thea Blystone has a group of patients about 250 that rely on her for medication reviews. Guess what? Zero dispensing involved. And she’s still being paid as a pharmacist. And I think of clinical support, clinical decision support in her bag, in her tote, so she can pull that out and actually extract it. How do we start empowering an individual pharmacist driven by an NPI because they all have NPIs to be able to say, Hey, through a physician agreement incident two agreement, we now have this pharmacist that gives us 300 patients that are being managed by them. How does clinical support start trickling down to the individual pharmacist?

Dr. Steve Miller (22:19):

And I don’t think that this is something that is a one-off in Pennsylvania, we’re seeing this across the whole country and across the whole world. And we talk about the pharmacist shortage, which is acute, but the position shortage is also there. And classically, physicians have had to manage a bunch of health conditions that in some cases would be better managed by pharmacists who understand how the drugs work and the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of these meds. Sometimes there’s a bunch of chronic conditions. In some cases things like diabetes, chronic kidney disease, there’s a bunch of these conditions that pharmacists are currently being empowered in many places to manage in Canada. They’re ahead of us on this issue. And there’s a couple of European countries, but FTB in Canada has a product that we use that provides algorithmic guideline based decision support to pharmacists in the management of some of these chronic conditions where they are titrating drug levels, which pharmacists are better at than MDs in a lot of cases. They’re so have such a deep drug knowledge and are so drug focused where pharmacists are able to use these tools to titrate medication dosages and levels. And it empowers these pharmacists to manage and make treatment decisions, certainly in collaboration with doctors, but often fully independently from doctors. And this is a product that we are rolling out in the United States as well to be able to support pharmacists in providing this kind of high level decision support for their

Todd Eury (24:05):

Patients. Steve, you have to promise to come back and we’ll dig into this because I want to bring in consultant pharmacists who are focused on geriatrics. Let’s bring Jenna Quinn back, Dr. Quinn, let’s talk about pediatrics. Let’s bring in specialty pharmacies to talk about rare disease. You are everywhere in those spaces and the clinical decision support is so important. So thank you so much for being part of the HLTH 2024 show. My pleasure. It’s great to talk to you. Colin Baez back on the pharmacy podcast. It’s so good to have you back on.

Colin Baez (24:44):

It’s great to be back.

Todd Eury (24:45):

Alright, we are here at HLTH 2024. The events here are just supercharged. I get so excited being here. This is my second time. It’s actually twice as big as what it was in 2022. I don’t know how they keep growing like this.

Colin Baez (25:00):

Yeah, I believe it. It’s pretty exciting out here.

Todd Eury (25:03):

Alright, I want to jump in. So Dr First is an incredibly important part of the evolution of digital health and the fusion into healthcare. You and I are going to talk a little bit about community pharmacy and digital health. But first I do want to just for the listener’s perspective, why is it imperative to the industry to unite medical and pharmacy benefits?

Colin Baez (25:26):

Yeah, I mean think about the growth of specialty medications even within the last two or three years. Specialty medication, drug development, specialty medication application is skyrocketing thousands of percent actually. And there’s actually an important distinction between the two sides of the benefit coin. The pharmacy benefit. I feel like most of America, most of our patient population understands or at least can wrap their head around the idea of a pharmacy benefit. But the idea of certain drugs being covered under medical benefit gets confusing and people don’t quite understand that. And the amount of drugs, the number of drugs that are now falling under that medical benefit is also skyrocketing. And so in the universe of transparency and making things simple and navigating all of the friction that’s already inherent in healthcare, why don’t we have an ability to combine the view into both of those benefits on behalf of the patient, on behalf of the doctor? It’s so complicated already. Let’s ease that complication. And so these things are growing, these things are increasing in complexity. Let’s leverage technology to improve that transparency for all players in this ecosystem.

Todd Eury (26:51):

Alright, so we know there’s an explosion unfortunately of pharmacy deserts in the country, 2,400 just in the last 12 months that are shutting down 8,000 in the last 36 months. So technology is so crucial and more important than it’s ever been before, doctor first steps up. So we see that you’re currently, as that load on pharmacists, as that intensity kind of intensifies, they’re going to have to put out more to keep up with the population’s needs. So talk to us about that technology and how it’s helping through DR First.

Colin Baez (27:26):

Yeah, I mean we’re all being asked to do more with less. The pharmacy desert problem is real. It’s scary and it’s affecting, unfortunately, it’s affecting folks that are already underprivileged the most in my opinion. And so in order to do more with less, you’re going to have to find a force multiplier. You’re going to have to find something. And that something is typically technology. So health information technology has the opportunity to serve as that force multiplier. And we’re talking about things like automation. We’re talking about things like the thoughtful application of clinical grade ai, very narrow focused AI to solve very specific problems. Whether that’s improving the throughput of a dispensing pharmacy, whether that’s improving the accuracy of a pharmacy technician doing medication reconciliation, whether it’s improving the efficiency of something as frustrating as a prior authorization. All of these things lend themselves to technology. And right now we’re at a crucial inflection point for technology in the application of pharmacy services. So it’s actually a very exciting time and it couldn’t come fast enough in light of these things that you just brought up, like pharmacy deserts.

Todd Eury (28:45):

Absolutely. So I think of we’re at hhl TH, this represents all of health care, not just the sectors that we kind of dive into in pharmacy. We go to long-term care conferences. Sometimes we’ll head to specialty. I just got back from the NASP, the National Association of Specialty Pharmacy. You have something special within the portfolio of what Dr. First is doing in specialty pharmacy. Let’s talk about that. How’s that technology helping prior authorizations to speed up those processes to get people their first pill and then so on?

Colin Baez (29:18):

Yeah, I like to use two buzzwords when talking about the doctor first portfolio. One is total benefits management. So remember we started this conversation, the distinction of pharmacy versus medical.

(29:31):

We have a solution that actually encompasses both. So input your service, input, your predicted prescription, and no matter which way it’s covered, we’re going to tell you the answer. We’re going to tell you the copay, we’re going to tell you where you are in your deductible, et cetera. It is total benefits management. It’s not go here for one and go there for somewhere else. It’s actually a consolidated view on behalf of the provider and actually on the payer side as well, should they opt to use it. The other I like to talk about is end-to-end optimization of workflow. So Dr. First is uniquely positioned in that we have a piece of every part of the workflow for a specialty medication, whether it’s inception, the idea of me as a physician needing to write for that prescription all the way to helping the patient pick it up, engage in that prescription, afford that prescription, and then even afterwards in terms of measuring adherence and things like that. And so this is a really exciting time for Dr. First because the portfolio is actually growing and it’s growing in a direction that is meeting the needs of market demand.

Todd Eury (30:39):

Listeners, reach out to the Dr first team. Colin, where’s the best place to push our

Colin Baez (30:45):

Listeners? Dr first.com is the easiest way. A beautiful website. I’m also readily available. You can find me on X, formerly known as Twitter, LinkedIn. I’m sure we’ll link to all of those various things, but we are very accessible and I’m happy to talk to anyone.

Todd Eury (31:04):

This has been wonderful to re-engage with you, Colin. I always love your insights. We got to have you back on another show. We’ll dig deeper into specialty.

Colin Baez (31:12):

I love it. You know me, I’m up for anything.

Todd Eury (31:14):

Alright, Colin Ez with Dr. First. Thank you so much. Hey, thanks for having me. Rick Gates here with Walgreens at HLTH. Thanks for being part of the post show. That was great to be with you. All right, so this is a tough time in pharmacy. We have 8,000 less pharmacies now in the United States that we had three years ago. Pharmacists are under pressure when I think of HLTH, I think how do we infuse digital health with technology, with workflow with pharmacists to alleviate some of that stress so they can concentrate on the patients and what the patients really need. This is what Walgreens professes. I’ve read blogs about it. I’ve listened to Remedia Tandon talk about the importance of clinical trials at the community level. Rick Gates, this is why you’re here. Talk to us about what Walgreens is doing in the face of all this adversity.

Rick Gates (32:15):

And I know you’re saying it’s adversity, but I’d say it’s just a changing consumer dynamic. It’s really happening right now. And I think our ability to change and evolve our operating model to really solve that and solve it in two different ways, one that’s easier for a consumer, but then the second is how do we make it easier for our practitioners and team members as well? And so I think we have to invest differently and I think what you’re seeing is invest in are ways like micro fulfillment to fill off site and put ’em back in stores so that our pharmacists and technicians can deal more with consumers on a consistent basis. You also have centralized services where we can take hundreds of thousands of calls a day out of our stores, service them. So for patients, but then again, leave time in stores. I think we’ve made a lot of investments to start to support some of our stores, but we’re not quite there yet for the full fleet.

(33:00):

The other thing I’d say is a lot of the digital enhancements that we’re trying to do, we’re going to make it easier for consumers to conversely make it easier for our team members. So I hear all the time when I walk into a store, I might see a line, how do we actually solve for the things that consumers don’t want? So one way is actually something called digital checkin. So we’re testing it this year with vaccinations. You scan yourself, you let us know you’re there. It actually goes straight back into the pharmacy staff so they know that you’re there, checked in for your appointment, you’ve already done all of your digital bars and stuff online so that we know that you’re ready. We just walk out and call your name and go in and do the vaccination. How do we do that for anytime you’re going to engage with us, how do we actually have you communicate to us before you head to the pharmacy that you’re on your way down so that we can kind of get everything ready, set up our team members in a different way to really be much more successful.

(33:46):

And then the third thing I’d say is we’re using data differently. So how do we actually take data for how stores are operating or for what the right types of interventions we have for patients and get smarter about how we deploy that time that now we’re figuring up for our pharmacists to do something different with that patient that’s there. So maybe just not the one thing they came there for, but there may be three or four things that could be gap care closures or things that are going to be important that we want to put in front of our pharmacists. And I think use of AI or machine learning or however you want to look at it, we’re aggregating data to really do something different and help enable better outcomes for our patients.

Todd Eury (34:19):

So I’m also thinking of the serious disease state conditions that pharmacists are tasked that really helping to manage. You grab the football from the physician, you implement the treatment, you move it forward, making sure that they’re adherent, maybe involving them in some kind of med app on their phone so that they can interact with Walgreens. Talk to us about Z state management and how Walgreens is handling that for your communities.

Rick Gates (34:46):

Well, I think there’s two things. One is you’ve got to make sure you’ve got the relationship with the physician, which I think is important. And then obviously I think we all know somebody that’s left a hospital or whatever and they have a whole sheet of medications that they have to take. The best thing you can do is make sure your pharmacist has really helped reconcile the medications so you have a home versus what you just got prescribed. And then help start them down the journey. Because I think we all know one of the scariest moments is when you first get diagnosed with any disease state, if you’ll, and so getting people on therapy and helping them stay on therapy is the most critical thing that we do. And I think that’s probably where we focus most when it comes to disease states because once you get them on treated and staying on therapy, I think then it’s easier to help them understand other things around that morbidity or that disease state that is going to help them. And so I think that’s probably the biggest focus is getting on and staying on therapy once you actually get with a disease.

Todd Eury (35:38):

Hhl, TH. Why is Walgreens invested in this conference? This thing is amazing. I love coming. This is my second time here. Talk to us about this organization and your participation.

Rick Gates (35:49):

Our participation. This is where innovations happen. I think as Walgreens, we’re not going to build everything on our own. We’re not going to just solve everything within the four walls of Walgreens. I think that what we’re really trying to do is understand who’s really moving the needle differently, who can we partner with and how do we actually drive innovation within almost 120 5-year-old company in a different way than we have before? And so for me, I just love getting different ideas. I love meeting people that are really pushing the envelope and then figuring out how do we work together to really drive something different.

Todd Eury (36:20):

Rick Gates, this has been special to us. I want to thank you so much for being part of the HLTH post show. I want to invite you back and let’s dig into some of the issues that our communities are facing. Absolutely. It’s great to be here. Thank you. Bye now.

Michael Mann (36:38):

Awesome. This is Michael Mann at Planetary Health first, Mars next, and I am right now tuning into the only the pharmacy podcast network, the pharmacy podcast network. Cole Todd, awesome to be here

Todd Eury (36:53):

With you, man. Hey Michael, it’s special to see you here. This is a different environment. Every time I come to conferences, it’s intense around pharmacists, maybe in geriatrics, maybe it’s in just general. HLTH is this collaborative of digital health folks who really want solutions. We’re here because we want to infuse digital health with community pharmacy and we want answers immediately. The reason is 8,000 less pharmacies today than where there were three years ago. So we’re in an intense crucial time for public health. I just want your insights on that.

Michael Mann (37:30):

So when I think of a pharmacist, I think of not just back in the day when it was like your church, your family member, but man, that pharmacist was like where you went for everything. And so even when I was a little kid, but I’m also thinking back to when I was listening to my father’s stories in the small town, it was like he was a soda jerk at the local pharmacy. So it was the hub of everything. And so you’re losing that community trust because physicians can’t do everything. And a pharmacist is usually the lifeguard for every person who’s going in to know, Hey, did my cardiologist, did my doctor subscribe the right medication? Or what should I be on? So it’s like the first and only last resort of trust. So I think we need to do a lot more empowering to try to change that, I guess where that’s going that cycle. So how can we do that? I don’t know that answer.

Todd Eury (38:28):

So there are some dynamic players out there who are not waiting for permission, they’re asking for forgiveness. They say we’re not waiting. One of those is Sean Narron with a core rx. He doesn’t wait for anyone to tell him what he can or cannot do with his patient who’s locked in their home most of the time, who can’t get out to get their own medication and care. That’s the kind of model that we’re going to have to move forward with and expand upon throughout these communities that now don’t have a pharmacy five miles away. The nearest pharmacy is 15 miles away, and guess what? Public transportation doesn’t go there. So now it enters a CRX with transportation, with delivery, with oversight, with remote patient monitoring. That’s the future of community pharmacy.

Michael Mann (39:15):

Yeah, I love that. And I know Sean, I’ve had him on my show before. He’s just an awesome guy and I know from what he’s doing is not what he was, he’s just accelerating this.

Todd Eury (39:25):

No, he was in grocery store pharmacy and now he’s transformed into this. It’s like a quasi home care slash long-term care slash community pharmacy, and it’s awesome.

Michael Mann (39:36):

I would hope that he can lock in with the payers. It’s sort of that new way of where we’re going to be delivering healthcare.

Todd Eury (39:43):

Yeah, exactly. Absolutely. Alright, we’re at H lt h What? What’s something that you are focused on while you’re here? What’s important to you?

Michael Mann (39:51):

Well, I’m really excited that we’re doing media. We’re approved media here, the podcast.

Todd Eury (39:55):

Congratulations.

Michael Mann (39:55):

Yeah, thank you so much. We’ve done about 130 episodes almost on two years and trying to do more panel discussions. Brought on a physician, senior physician contributor, Dr. Alyssa Abo, Suzy Ingal, kind of bringing that med tech advisor perspective and we’ve been doing a lot of discussions today. We’ll be doing a lot more discussions tomorrow in the village media here. Really thankful and appreciative of the health for allowing us to be here and just meeting a lot of awesome people like yourself, startup founders, people that want to see change and doing really cool stuff. A lot of AI talk, but just being energized really by these discussions.

Todd Eury (40:38):

Alright, I’m going to make a call out to pharmacists, listeners that are listening right now. I want them to reach out to you and become part of your programming throughout 2025. If you’re listening and you have a passion about pediatrics or cardiology or HIV or women’s health, whatever, reach out to Michael Mann. He’ll get you tied into a theme where he’s not just talking to one person, he’s talking to a whole panel of people. You guys are good at that whole panel discussion thing. So I think that fusion’s really important.

Michael Mann (41:09):

Yeah, I really appreciate it, Todd, and it’s been good to have you on. We’ve exchanged as well. You’ve come on my show. And what I like about the panel is because we’re content, we’re the new wave of educating. And by content, meaning it’s real, it’s not scripted. Of course, we’ll have a topic kind of stay off the, have some guardrails, but really it’s creating real innovation, spitballing and creating what conversations that can really help others be empowered. And then just enlisting others to participate with us in this journey.

Todd Eury (41:43):

Matthew, thank you so much for being part of the HLTH coverage here, 2024. We hope to meet up with you next year. Listeners are going to want to learn more. Where should they go to learn more about IDO

Colin Baez (41:54):

Id.com. Nice and straightforward, www.id.com and you’ll find everything that you need to know there about the future of human centered design.

Dr. Russell Robbins (42:10):

This is Dr. Russell Robbins from Purple Lab, and you’re listening to the pharmacy podcast.

Todd Eury (42:17):

Purple Lab is back. We just got to interview Dr. Russell Robbins at the NASP talking about specialty pharmacy. And I missed you, Russell. I was not able to spend time here yesterday because I had a bag disaster. I loaded all of my luggage into my lift and my equipment bag fell out of the car. Nobody knew it. I drove to the hotel, he gives me one bag. I’m like, dude, where’s my equipment bag? We had to go back to the airport. I was saying Hail Mary and our fathers the entire way to the airport. The Lord blessed me. They found the bag. It was in lost and found.

Dr. Russell Robbins (43:00):

Oh, that’s great. Welcome to Vegas. Well, absolutely. That was like my travel experience. I was actually in Vegas last week, Tuesday to Thursday for the A MCP conference and was supposed to get here one o’clock in the afternoon, got on the flight and they had a mechanical, we got delayed. And so instead of getting it at one, we got in at nine o’clock at night. Oh my gosh. So luckily the presentation was the next day, so everything worked out fine and then went home Thursday,

Todd Eury (43:30):

Came back again Saturday. Yeah. This is travel season for us. Three conferences in October. Purple Lab’s been important to our network because you’ve been bringing discussions and ideas around things that we’re just not getting enough information on. I missed your panel discussion yesterday here at HLTH. Give our listeners a little summary of that panel discussion.

Dr. Russell Robbins (43:52):

Sure. So what we were talking about yesterday was health plans and wellness and preventive care and how health plans are using data for understanding wellness programs and preventive care. But then also with the Purple App data that we have access to with the social determinants of health information, using that to really shed different types of lights on immunization rates and other types of preventive care that individuals will getting.

Todd Eury (44:28):

So when I think of the follow up that pharmacists are kind of listening to the data that you make available and I think of the collection of the medical record side of things, then all of a sudden the pharmacist responds. What studies has Purple Lab done to show the necessity to make sure that the data is coming back from the pharmacist to the electronic health record? Has there been anything that you’ve operated on that kind of shows the validity?

Dr. Russell Robbins (44:55):

So we don’t do anything at this point with electronic health records. We just take claims that have already been adjudicated. So we don’t have any insights into what’s going on at the point of contact. We only know after it’s been adjudicated, after it’s been paid or if it was rejected or denied. We know that information. So from a pharmacy perspective, we have ways to track the patient journey throughout the process. Looking at for any given drug, did the patient get the medication? Did they abandon the medication at the retail window, or was that medication denied? And if so, what were the reasons for that? With the social determinants of health information, we can then look to see what kind of demographics fall into each of those different categories and come up with potential solutions for how to mitigate some of those issues as well. At the panel discussion yesterday, one of the questions of course is with preventive care and immunization rates, how do we look at that and how did the health plans use that information?

(46:01):

And years ago, right when the Covid Pandemic started, one of the questions that I was asking when they were first talking about we need to develop some type of vaccine is what’s the likelihood that these vaccines will be utilized? And so we looked and I said, there are really three different categories of vaccinations, and this gets back to preventive care. You have the pediatric population, so most parents are going to make sure that their kids get immunized for those types of things. Then you have the adolescent population. So they’re getting the HPV vaccines, they’re getting the meningitis, vaccines and sports athletics and stuff. So with those types of things, there’s a little more parental questioning, should I do this or not do this? And so you see some drop off there. And then you have the third group, which is for adults, the shingles vaccine, the Pneumovax.

(46:54):

And so you can see when it’s my own personal decision to make, you can see discrepancy, you’ll see more drop off. So what we did is we took all of that data, we then overlaid voter information on top of that. And so what we could start to see is before, again, this is before the Covid vaccines even existed based on voter information, we knew where there would be higher uptakes of vaccines compared to in some regions, red states, blue states, but even certain blue states, you could see lower utilization rates because of people’s anti-vax bias, even back then. So I knew beforehand, you’re not going to see much vaccines going on in this area of the world, even after it’s available because they just don’t take, just in general, don’t do vaccines.

Todd Eury (47:56):

That’s something that goes full circle. And we’re focused today while at hhl, TH, all about community pharmacy and the fusion of digital health. That’s why Purple Lab being part of this conference and being part of this show is important that our teams understand while there is an organization out there that can really make sense of this, but then you can also bring new insights to these pharmacy decision makers, these people that are building their businesses to look ahead, especially during seasons where things like immunizations are really kind of growing and preparing for that.

Dr. Russell Robbins (48:29):

Correct. Yeah. And so that’s one of the reasons why we come to conferences like Health is to really let people understand that we have a breadth of data, medical claims, pharmacy claims that you just don’t get access to from most of the other data vendors because we’re at, it’s all de-identified. But because we have the social determinants of health linkage at the individual drug and at the individual physician level or facility, now you can get insights that you can’t get from other data services.

Todd Eury (49:02):

If you are in community pharmacy listening to the show, reach out to Purple Lab, purple lab.com. Ask them, you heard Dr. Russell Robbins on the show. You want more information? Imagine reaching out to a physician through the data that they give you, and you already know before you call the physician what gaps there are in care and being able to use that for business development. I love this, Russell. We hope to obviously continue to have you back every once in a while, educating our listeners Purple Lab, Dr. Russell Robbins, thanks for being part of the show. Thank you, Todd. Always great to.