As part of RxSafe's ongoing series on pharmacy transformation, we bring you this video recap of the California Pharmacists Association (CPhA) webinar, sponsored by RxSafe and featuring pharmacy owners and business transformation experts, Kelby Gorman, RPh, and Steve McClanahan, PharmD.
During a lively panel discussion, led by Lisa Faast, CEO of DiversifyRX, these pharmacy leaders share valuable insights on how to transform your practice and improve patient health through syncing and adherence packaging. Made popular by PillPack and perfected by local, independent pharmacy owners, pouch packaging is a powerful but underused intervention that has been shown to improve medication adherence, patient health, and profitability.
Click below to watch the webinar.
A complete transcript of the webinar appears below.
Ronnie Visitacion:
Welcome, everyone. My name is Ronnie Visitacion. I am the Corporate Partnership Development Manager for CPhA, and we are very, very honored to have our corporate partner, RxSafe, hosting a webinar for us, Business Transformation.
Ronnie Visitacion:
I will go ahead and let Brady Chatfield from RxSafe, take it away and introduce himself as well as our moderator and speakers. You all are amazing. Thank you so much.
Lisa Faast:
Thank You, Ronnie.
Brady Chatfield:
Thanks Ronnie. I'm Brady Chatfield with RxSafe. We're in our 14th year here out in San Diego, California. We actually design, build, manufacturer, support, everything, right out of our office here in San Diego. And real happy to be on the webinar today with the CPhA. Our real mission in life is to just help the nation's 21,000 independent pharmacies to survive and thrive in this crazy environment that we're all in, with labor shortages and all sorts of things going on with COVID and immunizations. We really want to just partner with pharmacies to help you guys transform your businesses. So they'll be sustainable, so they'll be profitable.
Brady Chatfield:
We all know that you guys are the linchpin and community pharmacy there. You do it so much better than anyone else. I know a lot of our neighbors and friends are just much better off because of who you are and what you do.
Brady Chatfield:
So I wanted to say, thank you for that. Let me introduce Dr. Steve McClanahan. He is the pharmacist and owner at Hines Street Pharmacy, and has been serving patients there for more than 10 years, doing everything from custom compounded medications to immunizations and health monitoring, and also doing adherence packaging as well. Steve, welcome.
Steve McClanahan:
Thank you for having me. Appreciate you.
Brady Chatfield:
My pleasure. And we've also got the privilege of having Kelby Gorman here. He's a pharmacist and owner of Moore's Compounding Pharmacy, with two locations. He's about personalized care. Combining high-quality products, striving to help patients reach their health and wellness goals. And one way Moore's pharmacy does that is through offering high-quality supplements within their adherence packaging that they do. Kelby, thanks for joining us today.
Lisa Faast:
Kelby's on mute.
Kelby Gorman:
There we go. Thanks for having me.
Brady Chatfield:
There he is. Thank you. Really appreciate your time today. And then last, but certainly not least, we've got Doctor Lisa Faast, who has been just an innovator and a leader in the independent pharmacy space. I know she had a pharmacy here in California as well and has more than 20 years of experience owning, running pharmacies, consulting, compounding, and just being an all around passionate business woman. She now is CEO of DiversifyRx, which is a consulting and education company aimed at that same thing, helping independent pharmacy owners to thrive by focusing and diversifying and growing revenue streams. Welcome Lisa.
Lisa Faast:
Awesome. Thank you, Brady, very much. Do you want me to go ahead and take it over now?
Brady Chatfield:
Yeah, I'm going to just fade into the background here. I'll still be here. I can answer questions on chat. But why don't you take it away, Lisa and Steve and Kelby. I'm real excited to hear what you guys have to say today.
Lisa Faast:
Awesome. Thank you so much, Brady. And thank you to RxSafe. I am a big fan of RxSafe. I remember the first time I saw your guys' packaging machine in person and I was blown away by how first, how small it was. And second of all, just how streamlined it was. So I really appreciate you guys and the innovation that you guys do in the industry. And really just the support you give to independent pharmacies is really awesome. So thank you a lot. I know a lot of people take corporate sponsors and stuff for granted, but you guys really go above and beyond. So thank you so much. So we are here to talk today about business transformation and the viewpoint for us is going to be the transformation of a pharmacy and the patient's health through adherence and compliance.
Lisa Faast:
We all know that compliance adherence helps improve patient outcomes. No matter what, as pharmacy owners, of course we want our businesses to thrive, but first and foremost, we want to take care of patients. We're pharmacists first. And so improving those patient outcomes through adherence and compliance is a really great way to do that. It's probably the low hanging fruit in order to be able to do that.
Lisa Faast:
So I want to talk about the business transformation with both, Steve and Kelby, of what that journey looks like. So before we talk about the transformation, I think we need a picture of where we were at to begin with. So maybe Steve, let's go ahead and start off with you.
Lisa Faast:
Describe to us a little bit about what your pharmacy was like before you implemented a compliance packaging, before you got any automation to help with that? What was life and like in your pharmacy?
Steve McClanahan:
The best way I can answer that is you don't know what you don't know. And for me that was, I was going along very well. I had a great staff, great volume, and taking care of great patients. And I just looked at my quarterly and trimester reports that show my DIR fees and they have continued to grow and grow and grow. And that hurts. You just don't know what you're missing until you take a look at the reports. And the other thing that I was in the shadows of, was paying attention to inventory levels.
Steve McClanahan:
I was concerned about minimizing my idle stocks and my partial fills. Those are still top priorities, but for all intents and purposes, the two biggest impacts that I could even relate to anybody about adherence packaging for me, was improvement in DIR fees and what my inventory levels have done.
Steve McClanahan:
I've probably taken over a hundred thousand dollars off of my inventory, and the DIR fees, who can really quantify that? My volume for sales has probably gone up anywhere between 15 and 20%. And my DIR fees were pretty much flat or shorter than what they were.
Lisa Faast:
That's fantastic. And that really resonates and mirrors what I hear from pharmacy owners every day when I talk to them. So Kelby, give us a little bit of insight into what your pharmacy was like before you had maybe an adherence or compliance whole processing system?
Kelby Gorman:
Absolutely. We were in the same boat that everybody else was in, beginning to see increase. Goodness, we saw high levels of DIR fees over the last three and four years. Adherence dropping. Profit margins shrinking. It's the same story that everybody can quote. It really hit us just before COVID, when we really decided we had to make a change.
Kelby Gorman:
I had been looking at RxSafe for probably three or four years, trying to find a way to get into adherence packaging as best we could with as low cost and then finally decided to just jump off and jump in.
Kelby Gorman:
But what we did with that too, and we're still in the infancy of that, we're we now have, I think, 50 patients that we've got on adherence packaging. With COVID staffing issues it's been hard to grow it, except for the growth program at RxSafe. We doubled number of patients that we've had probably the last two months within starting that program.
Kelby Gorman:
But we were able to diversify too and start making our own supplement vitamin packs. So I've got 13 different vitamin packs now that we use the RapidPak for. That has tremendously aided our supplements business in our other store. So we keep the RapidPak machine in our traditional pharmacy, but we make the vitamin packs for our other store.
Lisa Faast:
We will definitely dive into those vitamin packs because I'm a huge fan of those. So we will definitely get to that for sure. Now that you're in that infancy stage, you're in that little bit of beginning...
Lisa Faast:
I'll pause here for just a second. Anybody watching, this is an interactive session, feel free to type in the comment box. I'm watching the chat. I'll either interject with a question or we'll make sure your question gets asked and answered by anybody here on the panel. So feel free at any time to just pop in a question when it pops in your head. Don't worry, I'll ask it when appropriate.
Lisa Faast:
You've mentioned that you were in the infancy of this, so how was this originally accepted or not accepted maybe by your patients, by your community, by your prescribers? What was their response when you first started to roll this out?
Kelby Gorman:
Patients didn't even begin to understand what adherence packaging was. And probably the funniest story we have is one patient that we got on the adherence packaging, she was taking the adherence packaging and tearing them open and putting in her weekly pill reminder. And we're like, "Wait a second." So we failed obviously, in explaining to her the benefit of this. She didn't quite get it.
Kelby Gorman:
But patients have begun to accept it. It's a matter of just getting the information out to them, talking to them about the program, explaining to them the benefits of it. Especially family members of older patients too. They're the ones that are usually struggling to help their parents or so forth, do that. But I've had younger patients that are like, "I forget to take my medicine. I want to be on this."
Kelby Gorman:
We had a broad range of acceptance from, "I want it right now." To other people that were like, "Well, I don't know, it's something new." So you've got to get over that, something new, barrier. It slowly started growing. It wasn't until we really reached out to the growth program that, that really made a big difference. I guess their outreach was really the thing that connected with the patients. And then I was able to talk to them and get them on board.
Lisa Faast:
What I found in some of my pharmacies is that my patients, some of them had been pre-educated by Amazon and PillPack. That was actually a benefit to us because it helped us get over that hump a little sooner, because it was like, "Oh, it's like that." That actually helped, but I'm sure that's a little bit demographic type thing of their awareness of that.
Kelby Gorman:
Absolutely. We're in a small rural area. So not as exposed to that. You're going to see the PillPack marketing, but they're going to market, obviously, to the population saturated areas first.
Lisa Faast:
Absolutely. So Steve, switching over to you, we got a little insight, I would imagine you had a similar kind of uptake or non-uptake of patients, but tell me a little bit about your employees? How did the employees respond? Because I think that's a concern that a lot of pharmacy owners have is like, "I'm going to throw one more change at my voice here and how is it going to land?"
Steve McClanahan:
Well, full disclosure, full 100% resistance whenever I brought this idea to everybody. One or two of my guys, they're the people that are going to go along 100% on board with whatever I say, and no resistance whatsoever. They're true followers, I guess. Those guys, they had to smooth some things over for me, but getting it going, initially, the hard part was trying to figure out who got to play with the toy.
Steve McClanahan:
And, oh my goodness, it looks like a slot machine, if you and will. With the lights and all the color show that goes on, we can park it in our drive-through window so that people can see it, and we'll catch patients because of that as well.
Steve McClanahan:
The staff, nobody likes change, and one of the things that I think you and a few others around the industry say is, "Without change, there is no change." So you've got to put some faith into it. For me, what that looked like was just explaining to the staff this is the right thing to do for the patients.
Steve McClanahan:
There's lots of people that can utilize this and get the benefit out of it. It might make the difference between keeping Mrs. Jones at home, and her going to the nursing home, which really isn't where she wants to go.
Steve McClanahan:
It makes a night and day difference for the mom that's got two or three kids at home that are all special needs. She needs some extra help and some extra time just to make things right, so that she doesn't miss doses, so that the kids get the right product for the right kid, instead of Jimmy getting Suzy's and vice versa.
Steve McClanahan:
The things that we get from the patients is just very, very resounding loud. Once the two key members of my staff started hearing the thank yous and some positive feedback coming back from those patients, just hook, line and sinker, they're in love with the program.
Steve McClanahan:
It doesn't work without a synced program. You have to sync it, otherwise, it doesn't work at all. If you have trouble communicating, sync issues with patients, you're going to struggle with it. But if you have a sync coordinator or somebody that specializes in getting those communications to the patients and getting key updates to patients and vice versa, then it'll go off without a breeze.
Steve McClanahan:
There's probably a little bit more planning that goes into this than just a regular sync program, but for all intents and purposes, we're looking at things that are due a week out and trying to get it ready for the patient. So that sits on the shelf two or three days prior to their expected pick up time. And for all intents and purposes, we've probably missed one deadline in the last 18 plus months.
Lisa Faast:
That's fantastic, in the sense that you were able to start with a hundred percent resistance and then slowly get them over to where they're now champions for it. I think that you're certainly not alone. I think you know this. Your staff isn't the odd bunch. Most staff are very resistant to any change, as you said.
Lisa Faast:
But this, bringing in a whole machine and you've got to figure out a whole new procedure, and it messes up your workflow, and as awesome as it might be, once you're to that other side, that journey to the other side isn't necessarily a nice and even straight line.
Lisa Faast:
But it's fantastic that you stuck with it and you had the perseverance and really worked with the staff to get them to change over. What was the impact or the communication or any resistance or ease of adoption with prescribers? Did you guys start talking to prescribers? Did you show any of them? How did that work with rolling it out to prescribers?
Steve McClanahan:
We took our prepackaged candy packs to our prescribers and left several boxes at each of their offices so that they could play with it, sample it, look at it, touch it, feel it, whatever they want to do, send it home with other patients if they wanted to. We also made a video and stuck it on an iPad. My guy that goes around to the physician's offices, played it and let them see what it actually is, what it does, how simple it is to operate and basically what you've got to do to ask for it. Say, "I want this patient's meds all RapidPak'd."
Steve McClanahan:
Give us a call and we'll take of it. For the most part, every single prescriber bites hook, line and sinker. The challenge with that is that the prescriber don't dictate where the person gets their prescription. If the person's E-prescription is at Walmart, well, that's where they'll go, to Walmart. Until you talk to them, then you transfer everything over from Walmart, which we do on a daily basis, by the way,
Lisa Faast:
What I found that worked really well when visiting doctors' offices, like you said, I think a lot of doctors, they understand obviously, adherence. They understand the importance. And then when they see the ease of use of the strip packaging, I think they do adopt fairly easily. But change is hard for them too. It's not just the doctor's office, but you're having to work with the staff, the MAs, the receptionists. And so what I found that worked really well is creating a little bounce-back coupon, which is what I call them. Creating a little coupon on a tear-off pad, and that way they can say, "Hey, we recommend the strip packaging from ABC pharmacy," All of your information, they can tear it off and hand it to them.
Lisa Faast:
A lot of times prescriptions are eScripts now, so the patient never actually has the physical script, or even if they do have the physical script, like you said, they might be going off to their Walmart and just completely ignore that advice of the strip packaging. So I found having something physical that's handed to them either with or without the prescription, reinforces that tangible of, go to this pharmacy for this benefit.
Lisa Faast:
I found that that worked really well for me, for lots of initiatives, not just for adherence and synchronization, but certainly for that, because patients forget. They own their own habits and going down that same thing.
Lisa Faast:
We heard from Kelby, talking a little bit about how his patients increased and really the pharmacy growth service and program that RxSafe offers to the adherence packaging. Were you able to grow organically or did you lean into some of their marketing tactics?
Kelby Gorman:
It was all their marketing tactics. With their marketing tools, it really got the information out to the patients in a much better way than we were able to. I think in probably a simpler manner. That's the hardest thing, I think, for each of us as a business person. We can understand how to run our business, but always marketing our business is probably one of our hardest things to do.
Kelby Gorman:
And understanding the most appropriate way to market or the wording of things, that's probably the hardest thing for everybody to do. So their expertise in that is what really, I think, got the information out. It was personalized then in a text message with my name on it. So people recognized that, they would respond, we would call them back.
Kelby Gorman:
That's what I found, instead of trying to go to the text messaging, I just picked up the phone and called them. They recognized my voice. I was able to talk to them, explain the whole process to them and then they were like, "Well, heck yeah, I want to do that." So it was pretty high conversion rate. We were probably in that 80% conversion rate, the first week or two, that we were on that. It began to drop off after that, as we pushed into broader and broader areas. But initially we had a very high conversion rate on that.
Lisa Faast:
That's fantastic, especially during COVID. Because I think, as a lot of pharmacies shut their doors or a lot of people stopped going to pharmacies, or they really reduced the number of interactions, and so you almost lose that opportunity to have that touch point with the patient. That jolly conversation as you hang out at the counter and you talk to them, that just disappeared, I think, from pharmacies.
Kelby Gorman:
Right. That was a hard thing for us because we never had a drive-through until COVID. At that point we actually decided to add a drive-through because we felt like that was the time we needed to. And so that has really skewed the in-store business. That is a whole dynamic that changes in your business also. So that took some marketing changes in that regard, but we also found, I've got a full-time marketing person, we actually started going out and marketing to home health agencies.
Kelby Gorman:
So we marketed to home health agencies in about 10 different surrounding counties, because who is seeing those complex patients? It's the home health agencies. So getting them to buy in on it, they then can refer. That's where the conversion of outside business.
Kelby Gorman:
So we worked on the inside business with GrowthPharm but then the outside business, we tried to hit those niches. We've had some people that have converted over 15, 16 prescriptions.
Lisa Faast:
Wow.
Kelby Gorman:
That's a huge changeover when you're able to get that kind of switch on a new customer.
Lisa Faast:
Yeah. So with the increased business, were you able to operate it and just create more efficiency with your current staff? Or did it force you to have to hire new staff? What was that like?
Kelby Gorman:
We're still running the current staff. We've definitely had some staff change over with COVID. We haven't had a huge growth yet, most of our conversion has been internal. Our external growth has not been that big. So we've been able to handle that internally, but it's a huge factor when you're beginning a sync.
Kelby Gorman:
So we essentially started a sync program and adherence all at the same time. So that is a real challenge too, within your pharmacy and getting people to now understand how the workflow is going to change in your pharmacy. And if you don't have that one person that can do it and do it well, that makes a tough too.
Lisa Faast:
Yeah. I think that's a really important point. That you should have a point person, not to say that all the responsibility falls on that one person, it most certainly does not, unless you have a super small team. But really, a lot of your technicians, your pharmacists, your cashiers are all going to be involved in some way, shape or form of an adherence and compliance packaging program.
Lisa Faast:
But somebody needs to own it and it doesn't need to be the owner, unless you have nothing else to do and you're sitting in your office, twiddling thumbs. I don't know an owner who's doing that. It needs to be somebody that really gets passionate about it. They buy into it, that switch flipped and they really understand it and they own it. They own the metrics. They own for delegating. And people need to understand that when it comes to that program, that person's the boss. They may not be the boss of everything else, but they're the boss of that program.
Kelby Gorman:
That's hard being in a small area that we're in. We don't have a large pond of selection for employees. So trying to find that dynamic person is tough. We're not even at max where we need to be on that. If we can find that dynamic person that will really buy into it, then I think we can really take off.
Kelby Gorman:
We're probably at a 60% to 70% effectiveness, but that's the way with your business everywhere. You've got to be able to find those right people to put in the right place. And it's a struggle at times, especially during COVID, where everybody was being paid to stay at home, it's hard to find workers.
Kelby Gorman:
We're coming out of that now, I think. So maybe we'll be able to find that right person that really can take this with the enthusiasm, the understanding, the drive, to really make it go.
Lisa Faast:
Absolutely. Steve, we're going to switch back to you and talk about the same thing. What was your growth like? What was your conversion like? Did you lean into the Business Transformation Program that RxSafe had or did you just focus on organic methods?
Steve McClanahan:
We operated the RapidPakRx for about a year before we jumped into the growth program. And in that first year we grew our patient count all the way up to about, I think, 45, maybe 50 patients in a year. That's neat. Nothing wrong with that. That's definitely something I think that my staff was very proud of.
Steve McClanahan:
Whenever we put the program that RxSafe put together for us, in place, in 90 days we went from that same 50 to just north of 150.
Lisa Faast:
Oh wow.
Steve McClanahan:
I'm just sitting dumbfounded from that. Some rapid growth for changing the workflows and moving people around, yeah, very pleased, very ecstatic about that. Most of that is 90% internal growth. The patients that we're growing or acquiring from outside are basically the friends and family and the people that talk to the people that get our RapidPaks.
Lisa Faast:
Marketing does work people. If you do it right, marketing works. How has your revenue changed in that sense? When you're converting over to this and you're synchronizing people, they're coming in, are you having those opportunities to make those, whether it's therapeutic optimization or drug-induced nutrient depletion, or diabetic shoes? Has it helped you to increase the total revenue from each patient that's coming in that gets the RapidPak?
Steve McClanahan:
Oh sure, yes, absolutely. The nutritional depletions, we run the report off of Amplicare. And for the most part, if my sync coordinator can bring it to the forefront of her mind to ask those questions and bring those things to the patient, then yes, nine out of 10 times, 100% conversion. Picking up products, adding interest to new services and just creating awareness of more services that we can provide.
Steve McClanahan:
I remind her all the time, its not a sprint, it's a marathon. You're going to touch base with this person probably every month, if not more frequently, but at least once a month. Some people we're going to touch base with every few days.
Steve McClanahan:
That is your opportunity to continue those conversations. And that's your opportunity to continue to provide value for those patients. Creating that value that will purchase your product and your service, and they'll continue to utilize you.
Lisa Faast:
Yeah. Thank you, that was a really good point there too, that it's not a sprint, it's a marathon. As much as pharmacy owners want to get all of their sync patients and recommend all the supplements and everything all at once, you don't need to do that. In a perfect world, it'd be great to wave that magic wand, but I don't have one and I don't think anybody else does either.
Lisa Faast:
It is a step by step approach. Maybe it's a goal of 10% patients each month, and over the course of 10 months, you're going to hit them all. You don't have to get it all done in the first 30 days in order to be successful at it. I think that's a really important point.
Lisa Faast:
It's going to change. You're going to offer new services when you start adding testing or vaccines. There's always going to be, I think something new. At least there should be something new you're talking to that patient about each month. It's just going to take a while to get through them all. It's okay to not do it all in one month.
Kelby Gorman:
Absolutely.
Lisa Faast:
So going back over to you, Kelby, let's dive into those vitamin packs now. So tell me a little bit about your vitamin pack program because I've seen a lot of different versions of that. But share with everybody that's watching and listening, what are your versions of the different vitamin packs and how you run that program?
Kelby Gorman:
Well, first of all, the store that I work out of is mainly a compounding only store. So with that we have a wellness front end. So I don't have a traditional front end. My whole front end is nutritional supplements. So that's our business.
Kelby Gorman:
But what I began to really understand, even if you carry specific product lines, getting people to maintain with that product line is not 100%. With the RapidPak, I just saw a avenue where I could control the business. So by generating the vitamin packs, it was a 30 day turnaround. They were in your store every 30 days. They were always having to get it from you. And that maintained the business. If you take very many supplements, you always realize a week or two after you run out of one, you remember, "Oh, I'm supposed to be taking my vitamin D." Right? So you were losing sales. This way, it was a guaranteed return.
Kelby Gorman:
So then what I did was I started with just basic multivitamin. So I started with a basic multivitamin, a basic men's, a basic women's, started small, basically lost leaders. I wasn't losing money. I priced them at a low point to generate interest, get people used to doing that. Then I went in with more of an advanced multiple vitamin, a super multi, higher price points, better margins, better quality of products.
Kelby Gorman:
It was an easy upsell, really. The basics hardly sold at all. Even when we introduced in, we could always jump them up to the next higher price point. Those had become the turnaround. What I made sure to do though, was make sure I used quality supplements. I used the supplements that I kept here. I've talked to other people that were doing vitamin packs, that they would go out and they would get this or that or something they weren't already selling to reduce their cost. I didn't think that was a good idea.
Kelby Gorman:
I wanted to maintain everything that I was selling in the stores is what I wanted in my vitamin packs, so that they knew they were getting a quality product. When it's listed on the back of the package, it tells that it's Pure Encapsulations Vitamin C or it's Ortho Molecular, it's Orthomega 820. So they knew exactly what they were getting in their pack.
Kelby Gorman:
And then marketing. We have always marketed. We do TV, we do radio. We've pretty much gotten away from straight TV. We're doing streaming with OTT. So the over the top advertising has been very beneficial. Radio, so we've had that branding. So I then made all my commercials, started advertising that out there. And I started bringing in. So we now have our multivitamin packs, I have a diabetic pack, a heart health pack, I've got a bone health pack, a multivitamin plus bone. What else? I've got an immune pack, a super immune, I'm getting ready to start a stress pack.
Kelby Gorman:
So with those different things, hitting all the avenues that are pertinent, South Texas, high diabetic population. That has become one of our best sellers. Making sure you understand what's in it so you can sell the product.
Kelby Gorman:
At that point then, unbeknownst to me, I had one of my employees that had a reaction to the COVID vaccine. Went to a heart doctor. The heart doctor said, "Here, you need to go get the heart health pack from Moore's Compounding Pharmacy." And she just started laughing and he said, "What's so funny?" She said, "I work there."
Kelby Gorman:
And she asked him, "How did you hear about it?" "I heard about it through one of my patients. They were taking the heart health pack they've been doing really good. So I recommend it to my patients."
Kelby Gorman:
So just those kind of things. If you've got a quality product and you get that out there and it starts spreading, it'll start multiplying. And we've been able to, with that, increase our supplement sales by 25% and we're getting ready to even expand on what we're doing.
Kelby Gorman:
I started working with, with Chris Roell and we're expanding now through our online store and hoping we can expand outside of our area.
Lisa Faast:
Yeah. That's fantastic. I am a functional medicine nerd myself. And in a lot of my advice to pharmacy owners, I get on my soap back box quite frequently about how pharmacists need to be the experts in supplements.
Kelby Gorman:
Absolutely.
Lisa Faast:
We need to be the ones to sell the high quality stuff.
Kelby Gorman:
Absolutely.
Lisa Faast:
Yes, it's fine to offer the little ABCs, but really, there's so many great professional labeled, professional branded products out there that have good profit margins. And these patients are buying them. If you don't think patients are buying them, they're just not buying them from you. They're buying them. They're buying either from online or from somebody else. And if you don't offer these to your patients, they're going to go somewhere else. And so I'm a huge fan.
Kelby Gorman:
Your marketing really makes a difference too, so the things that I would say in my marketing. So with my multivitamin packs, I would say that we use from leading companies in supplements. And then also I would use key points, our B complex has five times the amount of B Vitamins that your standard multivitamin product has. Things like that, it resonates with people.
Lisa Faast:
Yep.
Kelby Gorman:
So I've had people come in and I've had one lady that said, "I've been going to GNC forever and I heard your commercial as I was pulling into GNC." And she said, "I backed up my car and drove over to buy from you."
Kelby Gorman:
When you have quality and you say the right things that hit home with people.
Lisa Faast:
Yep.
Kelby Gorman:
I had another customer that's become a really good customer. He was driving around. He said, "I heard your advertisement." And he said, "Everything you said in your advertisement was what I was looking for." He said, "I hadn't been able to find that where I'd been going."
Kelby Gorman:
You've got to have a good product, but you've got to have the message too. You've got to think through how you want to market that. You can't just, "Hey, we have multivitamin packs." That isn't going to work.
Lisa Faast:
No. I always said, "The riches are in the niches."
Kelby Gorman:
Exactly.
Lisa Faast:
And the more specific you make it, the better off. I like Berkeley Life Professional, but the nitric oxide, for your ED patients. There could be ED packs where you're providing all of those vitamins that help the ED medications work. There's really almost endless possibilities of how you can iterate those.
Kelby Gorman:
Absolutely.
Lisa Faast:
We did have a question come through about what do you charge for your packs of vitamins compared to what somebody would come in and maybe buy the same bottles for? Is there an upcharge or how do you do that?
Kelby Gorman:
Really, there is not. If you look at it, pretty much on your supplements, you're pretty much going to be able to double on your cost. With my markup on most of these things, I'm running anywhere from 75 to 90% markup. So margin is a little bit smaller, but what I'm hoping to do with that is I've got to give some sort of incentive, number one.
Kelby Gorman:
If they can come in and they go, "Oh, well, I can just buy these this way and it's no different, then why should I change other than the convenience of the packaging?"
Kelby Gorman:
So yeah, the convenience of the packaging is going to bring them in. But what you look at too, is how much am I losing when they do run out of their Vitamin D or they run out of their Vitamin C or whichever one it is, and they go somewhere else and pick up a bottle.
Kelby Gorman:
If they have to come back to you every month, the more times you get them in your store, the better your chance of upselling them something else.
Lisa Faast:
Yes.
Kelby Gorman:
So it's that repetition. You've got to continue to stay in front of them in order to get that. So I gave up a little bit of margin, but overall I've increased my sales.
Lisa Faast:
That makes really good sense. And the other thing is because inevitably, even if you have a really loyal customer, I buy a lot of vitamins, some come in 30s, 60s, 90, 100s, 120s, and they all run out at different times, even if I all take them in way you're supposed to. And like you said, I'll be out, I'll be at a store and be like, "Oh yeah, I need some of this." And so I grab whatever that was.
Kelby Gorman:
Exactly.
Lisa Faast:
And that's exactly what happens. So it's really more that opportunity cost of lost revenue.
Kelby Gorman:
It's the same thing with adherence packaging on prescriptions. It's the lost value of them forgetting to take that prescription. So the principle's the exact same. It's just relating it to the front end of your business instead of the backside of your business.
Lisa Faast:
Absolutely. All right, Steve, we're going to switch over to you. Now that you've implemented more of an appointment based model, a synchronization based model. How has that affected your overall workflow and maybe some of your time to be able to do some other things, whether it's COVID vaccines or COVID testing? Have you been able to diversify into other areas because your prescriptions are now a little bit more on a schedule?
Steve McClanahan:
I don't know if I would necessarily say that we've diversified into a whole lot more. We've pretty much always offered those services, maybe a little bit more time to have those services implemented by more staff now. But just as with implementing the program at the beginning, lots of resistance from the staff, that look like, "Oh, how come we're losing one of our guys from workflow?" Well, you're not really losing one of the guys from workflow, one of those guys from workflow's taking about 25% of your volume away.
Steve McClanahan:
Does that help you any? And at the end of the day, "Oh, look, we're so much further ahead now." It balances out. For all intents and purposes, I've had to repurpose one of my people. About 80% to 90% of our time now is just filling stuff for the RapidPak. She was on the regular workflow and the other guys are missing her a little bit, of course, but she's got a little bit more of a specialty role now and no harm or foul in that.
Steve McClanahan:
Hopefully that translates to creating more value so that she can get a bigger pay raise this time around. No brainer.
Lisa Faast:
Yes.
Steve McClanahan:
But for the most part, just move some people around. The workflows have been adjusted and everything is just coming together like a glove.
Lisa Faast:
Awesome. So we are still in January, which is resolution and goal setting month. What other goals have you made for yourself, your pharmacy, maybe the staff member, but what are your goals for 2022 in regards to this area of your business?
Steve McClanahan:
I have a hard time putting an exact number, because going from 50 RapidPak patients in about a year, to over 150 in less than another six months, I just don't know what the limit is. But the more the merrier.
Steve McClanahan:
I think too, the best way to set my goals would be to reward the staff. The best way that I can is taking care of the people that take care of me and the patients. If my staff can help us achieve certain financial goals and certain patient goals, by adding more patients, adding more patients to the RapidPakRx roster, adding more patients to the sync roster, if that means creating more solutions for patients, we'll set up some incentives and we'll reward accordingly.
Lisa Faast:
That's fantastic. That's a great goal to reward your staff. Kelby, we're going to head back over to you. There was one more question on the vitamin packs. Do you offer custom packs for patients who are on a very specific regimen or do you only offer your prepackaged combos?
Kelby Gorman:
Right now I only offer my prepackage. I definitely will entertain doing custom. I had a gentleman ask me the other day, so I've got to work into that. Obviously, that would be a great thing to expand into. It just takes a lot of upfront work. So the way I've thought about doing that is much like if you go into a marketing agency, a printing company. Okay, there's going to be a $25, $50, setup fee and then this, because of the time that it takes to make the labeling to do those type of things.
Kelby Gorman:
But yeah, I would love to get to that. I'm open to anything. That was definitely a goal of mine. I haven't had a lot of people ask me that situation, but I think there is a definite market for that, so absolutely.
Lisa Faast:
Awesome. Well, can I ask you the same questions that I asked Steve? Now that you are starting this journey of the compliance packaging and more of the appointment based model with synchronization, what is it allowing you to do other things in your business? Are you diversifying any revenue streams? Are you able to focus on some other revenue generating opportunities? What does that impact on your overall time management in your overall pharmacy?
Kelby Gorman:
That's definitely our goal. We have not been able to do that. We've had such a high staff turnover in recent that we're back into a training mode with new staff. Once we get past that, then I definitely want to expand into other things. We've got to get into more point of care areas because obviously, we see where the controls are when insurance controls us and we have no control at all.
Kelby Gorman:
So the only way that we're going to grow our business is through those peripheral areas that are not controlled by insurance companies. So getting into those types of things, offering other services. So by increasing the synchronization adherence packaging, that is one of my goals is that it frees us up with more time. That we can get to that. But we're just not at the percent of our business right now. We're maybe 25% synchronized. So we've got to get dramatically higher before we see a big impact on that. And it's hard to do in the middle of the winter. So training staff, getting through that. So my goal by spring and summertime is that we are hitting some of those efficiencies where we can begin to do that.
Lisa Faast:
Awesome. That's great. Once you hit those certain numbers, you get closer to 50% and then boy, once you get above 50%, life looks completely different.
Kelby Gorman:
Right.
Lisa Faast:
So any last words for anybody that's watching this that might be considering starting compliance packaging, looking into automation? We'll go ahead and start with you first Kelly, in terms of any last tidbits that you want to share with anybody.
Kelby Gorman:
I've always been one to look at technology. If you're not utilizing every bit of technology in your business, it's hurting you. You got to work smarter, not harder if you're not doing that. So you've got to take advantage of those types of things. And with doing that, we jumped into the ScriptPro, probably goodness, it's been 18 years now that we've had that technology and getting into that, which helped automate the business.
Kelby Gorman:
Now getting into the adherence packaging, but then being able to utilize all those other things that free up your time. So definitely look at this, it's an investment.
Kelby Gorman:
But you've also got to look at how much money am I losing with my DIR fees. So when we get to that point that we can really see that turnaround, it pays for itself. With what we've been able to do right now with our vitamin packs. What we're making on the vitamin packs is paying for the machine. So it has allowed us to generate revenue in ways that we weren't able to do it before. And we'll only be able to expand on that as we get more and more efficient.
Lisa Faast:
Very well said. All right, Steve, over to you. Same question.
Steve McClanahan:
The best way I can describe it is if you're a passionate person about taking care of your patients, it's really the right thing to do. And I say that, because I did not realize that my parents were or not adherence to their medications until I got them convinced to get a RapidPak.
Steve McClanahan:
And all of a sudden Dad's A1C is down below eight. So guess whose heart feels so much better now. Some things you can quantify with dollars and cents, Some things you can quantify with sales.
Steve McClanahan:
For me, the ROI did not readily show up. I see it now. And whenever the ROI catches up with a great feeling that it can create for your patients and their loved ones, especially for the people that you're with all the time, taking care of those patient, you just can't replace that. You can't put a value on that. It's really just the right thing to do.
Lisa Faast:
Awesome. Thank you for that. Well, before we wrap up, I know there's sometimes somebody might want to reach out. They might be watching a recording of this later. Just really quick, if somebody wants to message you, how can they find you either on Facebook or email or something like that? If you guys don't mind sharing how another pharmacy owner might be able to reach out to you?
Kelby Gorman:
Absolutely. Anybody can reach out to me. I mean, phone number, it's Moore's Compounding Pharmacy, phone number (361) 853-2061. I'll be happy to chat that way. Email moorescompoundrx@yahoo.com. Another way to reach out to me, those would probably be the two easiest ways to get a hold of me, but I'd be happy to help because what I always find is I probably get more than I give.
Lisa Faast:
Yep. Thanks Kelly. What about you, Steve?
Steve McClanahan:
The store is the best way to reach me. It's area code (417) 735-0055. Just ask for Steve. Most likely I'll be tied up or talking to a patient, but please leave a message and I promise I'll get right back to you. Alternatively, email works. Email is usually a next day thing for me. It's not as prompt as it used to be, but my email is simple. It's Steve@hinesrx.com. And I promise you I'll get you the best information that I can.
Lisa Faast:
Awesome. Well, thank you to you both. I know you had to take time out of your busy day to do this. I know lots of pharmacy owners, pharmacist staff, are going to enjoy watching this and be able to learn from it. Again, thank you for having me moderate this, Brady and the whole RxSafe team. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you for thinking of me.
Lisa Faast:
I am Dr.Lisa Faast, I'm the founder of DiversifyRx and the Pharmacy Profit Summit. If you ever want to ask me any questions, feel free to send me an email at. info@diversifyrx.com.
Lisa Faast:
I also happen to own three different pharmacies. So I got lots of perspective from lots of different viewpoints. So always happy to help pharmacy owners thrive instead of just barely getting by. And that is the mission that we are all on.
Lisa Faast:
In addition to the mission of RxSafe as well, which is really to help pharmacy owners thrive as well. So thank you so much for joining us for this session. I really appreciate everyone taking time out of their day. Hope you got a lot of value of it and we will see you next time.
Kelby Gorman:
Thanks guys.
Ronnie Visitacion:
Thank you all so much. This was amazing.
