Best practices, tenacious independent spirit help kick off McKesson ideaShare 2016
A crowd of independent pharmacists, owners and various other McKesson customers filled the Arie Crown Theater in Chicago at McCormick Place, Monday afternoon, where McKesson executives welcomed attendees to the Opening General Session of McKesson ideaShare 2016. The event capped off a day filled with continuing education opportunities, marked the official opening of the 2016 McKesson ideaShare Exhibit Floor and saw the crowning of this year’s Health Mart Pharmacy of the Year Award winner.
Mark Walchirk, president of U.S. Pharmaceutical and lifelong Chicagoan, kicked off the program with his own Top 5 list of things to do in Chicago, before turning the stage over to McKesson SVP corporate strategy and business development Chris Dimos, who talked about the current challenges and opportunities facing independent pharmacy owners today.
Dimos presented attendees with four macro trends influencing health care today, underscored the need to change and evolve to meet the demands these forces place on independent pharmacists, and talked about how pharmacy owners can go about making changes in their businesses to follow and create best practices. (For more, see “Leveraging global strategy to help independents navigate macro trends in health care, business”.)
“These forces are happening — there's nothing we can do, we can't just close our eyes and hope it doesn't happen to us,” Dimos said. “We have to evolve our businesses. Our competitors are evolving their businesses, and everybody that we rely on in the healthcare ecosystem is evolving their businesses. … We have to make sure we make the investment in our time, our education, who we are and what we're providing to the patient in order to be differentiated.”
Dimos suggested four strategies independent pharmacy operators should deploy in order to meet the many challenges they face as all of health care moves to a value-based model. He urged independent owners to strengthen core business operations, expand clinical services, form partnerships with local payers and providers, and to develop new streams of revenue. He pointed to the regional winners of the McKesson 2016 Pharmacy of the Year awards — including Mountain View Pharmacy in Pleasant View, Utah and Iuka Discount Drug in Iuka, Miss. — as examples of companies that were putting these plans into action.
Pharmacy of the Year
Dimos turned the mic over to McKesson SVP and COO U.S. Pharmaceutical Frank Starn and Health Mart president Steve Courtman to announce the Pharmacy of the Year award winner, which this year went to the team at Rex Pharmacy in Atlantic, Iowa.
“Rex Pharmacy has strong community engagement,” Courtman said. The store, which was recently bought by Josh Borer, has been a key part of the community it has served for 75 years.
“They're certainly not running an old-fashioned operation,” Courtman explained. “They have a strong patient focus and rank in the top 20% in all Star ratings measures.” Since Borer purchased the store from a prior Health Mart owner, “the staff is very heavily tenured ... and together, they figured out how to evolve the pharmacy, which I think is just tremendous.” (For more, see “McKesson Pharmacy of the Year winners put patient care, community first.”)
“What excites me most about our future is the ability to have more collaborative involvement in patient care,” Borer said in a video. “We knew we had to change our mindset from a reactive approach to really more of a proactive management approach.” As an example of the need to expand clinical services, partner with local stakeholders in the local healthcare ecosystem and find differentiated streams of revenue, one of the newer services Rex Pharmacy has added, pharmacogenetic testing, “has sparked the interest of the local provider community,” leading to a partnership with nearby Cass County Health System.
Exploiting chaos, leveraging community
That community engagement Courtman described at Rex Pharmacy was also a key theme of opening session keynote speaker Jeremy Gutsche, founder of TrendHunter.com and author of the book “Exploiting Chaos: 150 Ways to Spark Innovation During Times of Change.”
Gutsche shared stories about his father Sig Gutsche, a serial entrepreneur who started early, opening his first business as a boy, selling old fruit from the local grocer door to door. Gutsche’s father went on to own a number of businesses before passing away in 2013 — perhaps most notably as the owner of the Canadian professional football team Calgary Stampeders, who at the time the elder Gutsche had acquired the team, had suffered from dismal attendance. Gutsche’s father righted the ship by reaching out to the community, personally chatting with more than 800 fans and forming a connection with them.
The secret to remarkable success, Gutsche explained exists at the convergence of hard work and overlooked opportunity. He pointed to failed examples like Blockbuster — which gave up on an online streaming business of its own that was giving Netflix fits at the time, to focus on retail — to highlight how past success can feed a most dangerous complacency among top-performing companies that can prove fatal to the business, driving repetitiveness and a protective instinct over what has worked in the past.
According to Gutsche many of the most successful companies in the history of business, from CNN and MTV to Disney and Microsoft, were all created amid times of massive change, exploiting chaos and upheaval to drive innovation and amass massive fortunes.
What separates these types of companies from those that accept the status quo or look to the past instead of the future for innovation, Gutsche explained, is a characteristic that also made his father successful — something he describes as the “hunter instinct,” a desire to fill unmet customer needs, to adapt very quickly to feedback and make changes to the business as a result. This type of thinking has helped propel companies like Zara to grow a $70 billion fashion empire.
It’s also a trait many independent pharmacy owners share, he explained. “In the end, I believe that there's a lot of opportunity in your world,” he said. “You're people like my dad was — talking to people, able to make th