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Wysong details reasons for Care Pharmacies’ fast growth

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Care Pharmacies chief executive officer Mike Wysong recently spoke with Mass Market Retailers editor-in-chief Jeffrey Woldt about the reasons behind Care’s robust growth. This is an edited version of that conversation, which is available in video form on massmarketretailers.com.

WOLDT: Maybe you can talk a little bit about your growth trajectory and the strategy behind it.

WYSONG: There is no question that we have experienced a tremendous amount of growth here over the last couple of years, and that does make us pause and kind of look retrospectively at some of the elements that went into that growth.

So, when I think about my time and tenure here at Care and the things that have made the organization special, I think that a couple of things can all be true at the same time. So I was fortunate to inherit a pretty good philosophy from a handful of community-based owners back in 1960 who recognized that there was a need for an organization to provide a lot of the back-end support that they didn’t have expertise in so that they could really focus in on the things that they were really, really good at, which was taking care of patients. So when I came to Care in 2010, I think I inherited a pretty solid philosophy. What I tried to do was take and slightly refine that, based on my own ­experiences.

Prior to Care I worked for organizations that you’ll know, Amerisource-Bergen and Cardinal, both great companies, and I learned not only about the industry and the components that make up the marketplace, but I also had a lot of really good mentors and leaders there that I would say were very representative of servant leadership and serving their customers well. So I tried to bring that aspect of my experiences to Care.

Part of that started with looking at the infrastructure here. Did we have the correct expertise in our employees? We were very deliberate in who we brought in. Looking at the operations side of the business, looking at the third-party contracting side, making sure from a finance perspective that we were exactly where we needed to be. We brought the new staff in, we sat and spent a lot of time talking about priorities that we would focus disproportionately on around the needs of our customers. I think we got that right. And then we spent a lot of time talking about culture. Those were some of the core elements at the center of a lot of that growth.

I also look at a couple of ancillary things that I think have had a major impact on that. You know, COVID is a perfect example. Back in February and March I didn’t foresee that we would have the disruption that we’ve experienced here. Our board of directors that provides general guidance and oversight to the organization has done a great job in helping us shift some of those maybe more midterm and long-range priorities into making sure that we’re properly positioned today to take care of our customers.

So it’s through their strategic oversight, the things we’ve done internally at Care, and then the last piece of it, and certainly not the least of it: We are extremely blessed to work in a marketplace with other providers that know how to work in really good faith. I think about Bob Morrison at Thrifty White. I think about Craig and Leon at H-E-B. I think about Rebecca and Craig up at Kinney. These are all credible providers and great partners, and we’ve learned a lot from those folks.

WOLDT: You bill Care as a mission-based pharmacy. What exactly does that mean, and how does it differentiate you from your competitors in the ­marketplace?

WYSONG: When I think about the things that differentiate Care, it’s probably our operating model. We’ve attempted to take the best of community chain pharmacy, the ability to move with continuity, and then to take the clinical spirit that resides within community-based pharmacy, put those things together and create something that’s the best of both of those worlds. I think that’s what’s largely differentiating us.

You know, when I think about mission-based businesses, I think back to when I was a young sales rep coming out of college. And, so I’m in my first job and I had the opportunity to work alongside my mentor, who also happened to be my father. And I called him one day and I said, “Dad. Is this what I’m doing? I’ve spent all this time preparing to be a leader and I’m working in clinical lab selling glassware.” And he said to me, “Son, you know, it’s not what you do, but why you do it. And what you do changes every day, and why you do it never changes.” And that has had a resounding impact on me. And so when I think about mission-based businesses, that’s what I think about. You know, one second you’re trying to source correctly, the next you’re trying to administer COVID vaccines. It’s why you do it, which in essence is to serve and organize chaos in the service of your customers so that they can do the same thing in the service of theirs.

WOLDT: Do you want to comment on your response, Care’s response, and the industry’s response to COVID?

WYSONG: What we’ve attempted to do was to get to the communities where we’re located and try to make sure that our patients are educated about what’s out there. We’re looking at a lot of educational programs for some of these phase-three clinical trials to make sure that the patient populations are educated about that. There’s a tremendous amount of disinformation out in the market right now. There’s a lot of fear. There’s a lot of politics. And so what we’re trying to do is bring some level sense of calm and collectedness to that chaos. And so we’re attempting to do that in some reasonable way as we all try to maneuver through the weight of that uncertainty.

WOLDT: Mike, I know that you try to foster collaboration. Maybe you can talk about how that works at Care, both between the central organization and your 105 members, and also among the members ­themselves.

WYSONG: So if I go back to my start at Care, we had just north of 40 pharmacies, and we were largely located here in the Mid-Atlantic. And so as we went to try to connect that and look at responding to the inherent needs of our customers, one of the things that we realized is that if you saw one of the customers, you saw one of the customers. There were needs that they all shared, but they all had their own uniqueness in terms of where they were and where they saw value in terms of helping their patients. And so that was a tremendous education for us. We were able to look at the continuity of all of those customers, aggregate those experiences, and basically create a road map in these patterns of behavior that really have served us well. We’ve watched our customer numbers grow exponentially, as well as our expertise in trying to help in navigating customers that are coming in, find new ways to grow the revenue. And so it’s really been an interesting thing for us. We’ve watched our drug chain become really a drug chain of consultants with an eye on helping other organizations come in and take advantage of the experiences. Both good and bad, by the way. There’s value in knowing what not to do, because you’ve already made those mistakes. And so I think that’s kind of the hallmark of Care. We’re able to use those past experiences in terms of moving forward in a more efficient way.

WOLDT: Taking a recent deal with ZeeAligners as an example, what have you done to help your members expand their nonprescription drug business

WYSONG: The ZeeAligners thing I think is more representative of what is likely going to be an expansion of services, out of community and clinical pharmacy, out into other areas of clinical care which bring with it new pathways of profitability. We want to make sure that the stores are stable and sustainable, that they have the cash they need to be able to reinvest back into other areas of pharmacy. So we’re hopeful that the aligner business will potentially turn into a denture opportunity. We’re looking at audiology, we’re looking at some noninvasive pain options and services. So you’re going to see that as the awareness of the potential to expand these services out. But those are just a couple of them that we’re working on. I would say we’re also very disproportionately focused on figuring out how to do a better job of addressing the inherent needs of the underserved communities, and our pharmacies are located in many of those communities. And so we’re working on a lot of pilots and programs to really do a better job of communicating with the most vulnerable patients.

WOLDT: Obviously your company is in good shape. It’s growing rapidly. You’re doing things very well, but there are still a lot of headwinds that the industry as a whole faces. How do you look at the challenge versus opportunity equation in community pharmacy today?

WYSONG: So that is like the $64,000 question. When I look at the marketplace, I think it’s very easy to segregate each of these pieces out, right? We look at the wholesalers, we look at the manufacturers, we look at the payers, we look at the providers. And I think you almost have to reverse that. All of that isn’t segregated; it is integrated. And so the challenge then becomes, as things change in any one of these verticals, it has a rippling effect all the way across that, and that creates some general uncertainty for any provider. And Care isn’t absolved from that dilemma, either. When I look at it, I am hopeful that we’ll continue to see that movement from fee-for-service to fee-for-value. My only concern is that the current structure is actually the biggest barrier to that movement. So I think you’re likely going to see less pharmacies. You’re going to see less community pharmacies as they try to figure out where the best time and return on their assets is. But I am very hopeful, that community-based pharmacy and chain pharmacy have the ability to communicate in a way that other providers will struggle.

Online digital is emerging and, as great as that technology is, can they communicate intimately with the patient and the consumer? I think we are structured appropriately to do that, given the chain and community pieces and the retail and specialty pieces of our business. I think that there are lots of reasons to be optimistic. The forward-thinking organizations will find new areas of profitability, new ways to serve customers, and new ways of doing business. In spite of the slow movement to fee-for-value, all the obstacles that everybody’s facing, I’m still optimistic that the forward-thinking companies will not only find a way to traverse that but find a way to thrive within it.


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