Costco’s mantra: Pharmacist participation, rapid results

How does a big-box warehouse club operator generate awareness of its health services when its pharmacies are dwarfed by a vast array of electronics, case-pack groceries, apparel and general merchandise? Don’t fight the box, said Michael Mastromonica, assistant VP of pharmacy operations for Costco Wholesale. Work with what you’ve got by tapping into the massive stream of customer traffic flooding the stores, and by highlighting your health-and-wellness offerings through pharmacist-provided counseling, preventive-health services and free health screening events.

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Even though all 480 U.S. Costco stores include pharmacy departments, “we have a similar problem that a grocery store might have,” Mastromonica told Drug Store News. “Pharmacy is not the ultimate destination. So how do you make people aware that there’s a pharmacy, particularly in an environment like Costco, where there’s so many things that go on?”



To boost the visibility of its pharmacists and health offerings — while at the same time giving its tens of millions of club members a valuable preventive-health service and another reason to come into the stores — Costco’s pharmacy team organizes hundreds of individual-store health events each year, offering free screenings for osteoporosis, heart and lung health and, most recently, diabetes.



“We move the events from region to region, and each region probably gets about six events per year,” Mastromonica explained. All of them have to meet three criteria, he added: they have to be free, they have to provide immediate results for members being tested and they have to be “clinically appropriate.”



Participation by pharmacy managers is voluntary. Costco enlists the support of OTC vendors to allay the costs of the screenings, but absorbs the costs of having an additional pharmacist on duty itself.



The chain began its embrace of in-store health events “shortly after I came here in 1998,” Mastromonica said, as a way to spotlight its pharmacy offerings and to provide its members additional value.



In the beginning, he explained, “we did ... health fairs, where we tried to combine a lot of services into one event.” That two-year experiment “didn’t pan out well for us.” The problem? “It was difficult to generate the sponsorship dollars necessary to make them happen. And the footprint necessary within the warehouse was problematic,” particularly on busy days like Saturday, he said.



“As a result, we went to uniquely defined screening events, starting in about ... 2000,” he said.



Since Costco launched its free clinics, focusing initially on osteoporosis, “we’ve probably done about 250,000 osteoporosis screenings,” Mastromonica said, with roughly 70 members participating in the bone-density tests at each single-store event. Since the 2005 debut of Costco’s cardiovascular “Healthy Heart” events, “we’ve done about 150,000 of those screenings,” he added.



Mastromonica said Costco’s pharmacists work alongside the nurses doing the testing. “The test results are given to the member and ... to the pharmacist who sits at the table with the people doing the testing, and that pharmacist gives the member immediate feedback on what the results mean and what the patient might do with the results. There’s instantaneous feedback from a Costco pharmacist, who is taken out of the pharmacy that day and put on the floor with the testing people,” he said. “The benefit is obvious, but also, what that helps me to do is introduce the pharmacist to the member.”



Next up for the chain in 2016: The expansion of diabetic screenings, and the rollout of a travel vaccine program, he said.