Before and after: Rite Aid STRONG
When Drug Store News last profiled Rite Aid in 2012, the company was posting its best results in years and completing a historic turnaround that saw the chain traveling full speed ahead on its Road to Wellness. Just over two years later, that journey has not merely continued, it has accelerated thanks to the team’s ability to deliver positive results and work toward achieving a vision to become a retail healthcare company that delivers a higher level of care to its communities.
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After three fiscal years of profitability and an impressive transformation, it’s obvious that there is strength in Rite Aid. And the company’s strength lies in its people, John Standley, Rite Aid chairman and CEO, told DSN in an exclusive interview. “You don’t make the progress we’ve made without the right team, and I’m very proud of this team,” he said. “It’s been a huge amount of work, and our team has really pulled it all together and pushed steadily forward over the last six to seven years. It’s been a great team effort.”
And it’s a team effort rooted in open, frank communications. “We have all those key elements of teamwork that define our culture,” Standley said. “We work well together. We communicate. We’re not afraid to resolve issues that come up.”
Rite Aid’s ability to right the ship comes out of those open, frank communications. “When you’re sideways financially, or not where you want to be, it can be a distraction,” Standley acknowledged. “It can also be very empowering,” he said, in that it creates a singular focus across the company to improve. “That’s what we did. We reached out to every Rite Aid associate and said, ‘There’s a lot of noise out there, but we can deliver on some very basic fundamentals — run better stores, take better care of our associates, take better care of customers. It’s going to all sort itself out.’ Which it ultimately did,” he said.
“It’s great that we work in an industry that gives us such a big opportunity to help people and make a difference in their lives,” Standley added. “There’s approximately a billion customer interactions annually at Rite Aid — prescription drop-offs, prescription pickups, front-end transactions, ... even more if you include all of the clinical interactions that go on behind the scenes.”
Rite Aid’s strength is in its vision
Rite Aid is steadily transforming itself into a retail healthcare solutions provider with nearly 4,600 points of care. Yesterday’s model, prefaced on reimbursement for dispensing medications, is fast becoming outdated, Standley said, and Rite Aid is quickly adapting its business strategies to reflect that reality.
“Health care is changing, and because of this the needs of the consumer are also changing,” Standley said. Between the shifting of healthcare costs to the end consumer and a population of 10,000 new 65-year-olds every day, as well as the high incidence of patients with one or more chronic conditions, patients and payers are becoming more price sensitive with regard to the cost of health care.
That makes them more receptive to the kinds of disease-state and health-management strategies Rite Aid has been developing and launching over the past few years. “There’s been a lot of focus on how we can tackle rising healthcare costs,” Standley said. And when you couple that increase in costs with a shortage of primary care practitioners, it has created a pain point that Rite Aid is ready, willing and able to resolve. “Consumers are now much more open to receiving care in alternative settings. It doesn’t have to be a primary care physician’s office,” Standley said. “We believe that face-to-face interaction really makes a difference in patient care and that our company is well positioned to do much more than just dispense oral solids,” he said.
“There’s a lot of discussion about the ‘retailization’ of health care,” Standley added. “When you think about that, we’re just very uniquely positioned — we’re more convenient; we have a strong network of stores; we have great pharmacists, pharmacy technicians [and] store teams to help take care of patients. We’re in a great spot to make a difference. Now we’re at a point where we have to figure out how to fully leverage that opportunity. That’s what we’re working very hard on right now.”
Today, Rite Aid’s singular focus is on creating a new kind of consumer health-and-wellness experience inside its stores. It’s manifested in the highly enhanced service offerings that Rite Aid is featuring in many of its stores, including Wellness Ambassadors and its Wellness store format; Care Coaches in the six markets where it currently operates its innovative Rite Aid Health Alliance program; and in RediClinic, which is expected to grow to over 100 locations by the end of fiscal 2016. “Everything we’re doing, from store renovations to investments in technology to new healthcare concepts, that’s all built around the patient interaction in the store,” Standley said. “And that’s driven by the associates in our stores.”
Rite Aid’s strength is in execution
With dedicated associates who are willing to collectively roll up their sleeves when the going gets tough, and a vision that steadily carries them into the future, delivering on Rite Aid’s promise to serve their customers comes almost naturally. “What drives our innovation is our desire to take great care of our customers and patients,” Standley said. “We’re constantly trying to find ways to help them. We’re very focused on things we think deliver or improve the quality of the care we provide. So whether it’s medication therapy management, or One Trip Refills, the Rite Aid Health Alliance ... it’s really about improving the quality of health care and patient outcomes. Our team has not only focused internally, but focused externally in terms of trying to find partners and open up the lines of communication — open up the doors,” he added. That’s the reputation that Rite Aid is building, Standley said. It’s a company that wants to innovate — a company that wants to work with partners on bringing new ideas to market.
“We have really tried to embrace that,” Standley said. “We’ve been willing to invest. Even in our darkest days, we were willing to invest in new ideas. We think the business has to continuously evolve or we will not succeed.”
After speaking with each of the top executives at Rite Aid, it all comes together. Rite Aid is strong because it welcomes change; the company embraces diversity and innovation. Rite Aid is strong because of its vision — to become a leading provider of healthcare services at retail. And Rite Aid is strong because of its associates, who, from the corporate headquarters to the store level, are willing to challenge themselves in identifying and serving their customers’ needs in a fluid environ