Special Reports Archive

One of Health Mart’s newest owners is Yang Xiong, who opened Minneapolis’ Northside Community Health Mart Pharmacy in July. A 2011 graduate of the College of Pharmacy at the University of Minnesota, Xiong spent his first years working for two national chains. That experience led him to want to operate his own pharmacy and have a more direct impact on his patients.

In 2006, Health Mart was a loosely cohesive buying and marketing group of 268 independently owned and operated drug stores, falling under McKesson Corp.’s store-support umbrella via its purchase of the old FoxMeyer wholesale business in the mid-1990s. Today, just seven years after its reinvention and relaunch by McKesson, Health Mart is the nation’s biggest independent pharmacy franchise and one of the fastest-growing drug store networks of any kind, with more than 3,100 member stores doing business in thousands of communities across the United States.

For Tom Davis, co-owner of Kiowa Health Mart Pharmacy, in Eads, Colo., technology has always been critical to the operation. “We put in our first pharmacy system in 1982. At the time, we may have been one of the first systems in Colorado, to be honest,” Davis told DSN.

Davis, a 38-year pharmacy veteran — 25 years with Health Mart — essentially organizes technology into 1-of-3 buckets:

Like politics, retailing is local. That inescapable fact is behind the ongoing build-up of Health Mart’s local marketing and patient care initiatives as McKesson shifts more store support muscle to the more than 3,100 independent pharmacies allied with the Health Mart network through its Local Marketing Support Program.

There are many ways a pharmacy operation can measure success; the most basic is to fill more prescriptions today than yesterday.

Ryan Merrell, head of marketing for Spence’s Pharmacy, a Health Mart pharmacy in Logan, Utah, is among many independent pharmacies who are using McKesson’s Physician Outreach Program to do just that by benchmarking total prescription share against their local market and helping to identify and build relationships with high prescribers in their areas — in real time.

Christian Tadrus, PharmD, who has been a pharmacist at Sam’s Health Mart Pharmacies in Moberly, Mo., since 1997, is a believer in using patient adherence strategies to help boost pharmacy operations. And with the implementation of health reform, adherence will be a key differentiator between pharmacies — a measurable indicator of quality of care.