Patients, Payments & the Path to Profitability | Pharmacist-Prescribed

In Episode 3 of Pharmacist-Prescribed, hosts Mary Kucek, PMP, Founder and CEO of OvaryIt, and Devin Bustin, MD, Chief Medical Officer of OvaryIt, explore how pharmacies can turn clinical services into sustainable, profitable offerings. The episode breaks down patient acquisition strategies, common billing and reimbursement challenges, staffing considerations, and how pharmacies can integrate clinical care without increasing overhead. Listeners will also learn how technology and policy changes, including the ECAPS Act, play a critical role in positioning pharmacists for long-term success as providers. Learn more about PRISM or request a demo at https://www.getprismrx.com

• 0:05Speaker 00

  You are listening to the global network of podcasters dedicated to the pharmacy profession. Welcome to the Pharmacy Podcast Network.

• 0:30Speaker 00

  Welcome to Pharmacist Prescribed, a series about the expanding role of community pharmacists in patient care.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Hey, welcome back to Pharmacist Prescribed Podcast Series here on the Pharmacy Podcast Network. Today is Patients, Payments, and the Path to Profitability. I'm excited to have back Devon and Mary from Prism. It's so good to see you both. Always a pleasure.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, thank you.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  You're listening along. There's going to be some show notes to support us. There is a podcast series that we're building. Just go out to the website, getprismrx.com. Once again, that's getprismrx.com. Go to the About section and you'll see the podcast library. This is going to be a lot more context to you for episode three upcoming. Episode one and two, we talked about the access and implementation. Today, we're going to focus on sustainability. How do pharmacies actually make pharmacist-led, clinical service, financial, viable, long-term decisions? I'm curious about this and can't wait to dig in.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  Absolutely. No, I think it's, obviously, it's great from a holistic health perspective to do clinical services, but we all understand that it needs to be profitable. You know, the incentives need to align. So for patients, that's great from an access perspective, but as a pharmacy owner, a small business owner, how do you do it in a way that also benefits your business? And I think in general, the sustainability depends on three main factors. One is patient demand, which we believe is there, and there's a lot of evidence to show that. Number two is efficiency, right? Like, you need to be able to work this into your existing workflows. And do it in a way that you don't need to increase your overhead significantly, like up-staffing, for example.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  And then, you know, three is appropriate reimbursement pathways, so making money for the services. I think we can all agree that pharmacists have been kind of giving away their expertise for a really long time, and that has become the norm, and it's what the patients started to expect. But you gotta stop doing that. You gotta, you know, capitalize on the fact that you're experts and that you're, you know, your guidance is valuable. So this is kind of the pathway to implementing it in a way that's long-term financially viable.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  And when you consider, you know, patients are already paying a lot of money every single year, even for urgent care visits, right? And urgent care is usually extremely costly. A lot of times, you're not going to see a doctor either. You're going to see kind of a mid-level. And it's so much more accessible to just go to the pharmacy and actually see a Pharm D at that point, right? And, you know, urgent care clinics, they also, they don't accept a lot of different types of appointments. So like, they're not doing basic vaccinations. They're not doing STI or test-to-treats for some things.

• 3:42Speaker 03

  They're not doing birth control consults. A lot of the things that pharmacists can do and are doing, urgent care oftentimes, I mean, I've tried to go to urgent care for birth control, and they tell me we don't do that.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:54Speaker 03

  So there's obviously this gap that exists, and, you know, patients are used to paying for urgent care visits up to a hundred to a hundred fifty dollars per appointment. So if we can take and translate even a fraction of that business and dollars over to the pharmacy. Everybody can be happy and it's not so much of a weight line in the ER and urgent care.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, from a patient perspective, they go to one place, they get their med, they go home, they don't have to then go to the pharmacy after the fact. And usually in urgent care, you wait, right? Like, it's not instantaneous. And the other thing is that even with low volume of services, we're not talking about twenty, thirty appointments a day. We're talking about one to two, three, four appointments a day, you're making reasonable additional revenue without disrupting, you know, dispensing. And you're actually getting new patients and you're getting more dispensing revenue as well. So, you know, we think the clinical services, they fail when they're treated as add-ons rather than integrated operations. And it really needs to be workflows that are streamlined with optimized staff roles.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  So, for example, you know, pharmacists are super busy. I mean, everyone's really busy, right? But pharmacist's time is valuable, needs to be protected. And so having a way for, you know, the pharmacy technicians to do some of the front of the house administrative efforts. You know, helping with the patient recruitment side, you know, these things become really exponentially important to building and maintaining clinical services in a retail pharmacy. And yeah, I mean.

• 5:30Speaker 03

  Realistically, Todd, you're a small business owner too, so you know, repeatable processes and just perfecting a workflow is really what shines, right? And you get good at it, you get more reps in, you become better at that service time and time again. So make it repeatable, make it billable and embed it into your daily operations and practice, just like any other small business does. And it becomes financially viable and a great service to add to the customers and patients.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  And then your whole staff knows how to do clinical services. It's like a new, new skill unlocked, right? And, you know, you can start small with one service, but that can be expanded upon over time. So that's the other key.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  I love it because it's a system that's ready to go and being able to plug in a process to it is going to build the systems, just like you said, Mary, to repeat it over and over again. So, all right, let's pretend we got the process figured out, we have implementation ready, Prisms in place. Now we need patient demand. We need to dig into creating demand somehow, and I don't want to spend a lot of money on marketing. So how can pharmacies find and engage patients for clinical services without worrying about a whole bunch of marketing? Maybe I'll be able to market later, but what about in the beginning?

• 7:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's a, if you build it, they will come kind of scenario, but they need to know that it's there, right? And so the awareness side is important. There's a lot of things that you can do for free, actually, right? You know, to build that patient awareness and make a commitment to building, you know, the services. So for one, you know, many pharmacies have foot traffic. You know, we've worked with some pharmacies that are in grocery stores, for example. Like, that's great, right? There's a lot of foot traffic. So you need to leverage things like that. Even if you're a pharmacy with lower foot traffic, it can still be, you know, helpful to recruit the patients that are in the store through, you know, printed posters with a QR code that they can scan to create their Prism profile, for example.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  If you are on a corner of a busy intersection, like having the sign on the outside, right? Like, just the basic stuff that is cheap but increases awareness.

• 7:57Speaker 03

  The next one would definitely be reaching out to your existing patients. I know even during the clinical trial, our trial participants reached out to, you know, the women who were, only had one or two months left on their contraceptive prescription, especially in the rural locations. That was a hotbed opportunity, right? Because they don't wanna have to drive one, two hours to get back to their general practitioner or OB-GYN to go get that script refilled. Um, it was much easier for that patient to just go, oh, I can get my script filled today while I'm already picking up, you know, this refill, perfect, let me do that.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  So, reaching out to the existing patients, letting them know that this uh, opportunity and offering now exists. Definitely reaching out to the ones that only have one or two months left on their prescription, but even like, beyond that, because so many patients are used to having to book at least like ninety days in advance with their doctor at this point. Like, you know, reaching out at the right time, um, and just ensuring that these people still want on that medication is helpful.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  Super easy, right? Because you already have that data in your pharmacy management system. So I know we've worked with a lot of pioneer RX, you know pharmacies that use that pharmacy management system. And like you can run your own report real quick and literally get every patient that has ever filled a prescription for contraceptives. And then you can have a tech do outreach when it's slow. And I mean, that's just, that's not only free, but it's highly targeted. The other thing is having the front of house staff having, have a script, right? Like if you're gonna initiate contraceptive services, for example, every female of reproductive age that enters the store, someone should mention that you do that service. They may not need it right now, but you're raising awareness. Um, and that will help them tell their friends and, and it will help kind of build that up.

• 9:54Speaker 03

  And we say, you know, we give these examples for contraception because, you know, that was, that is our launch point, right? That was our, that was our clinical trial and we have a lot of data to support that. But realistically, we're now released, releasing new modules. Um, that includes diabetes management, weight management, hypertension management, allergies, uh, management, wellness, women's health wellness. So you look in and you're getting these patients in that are on, you know, they're, they're taking medication. For diabetes or hypertension or anything else and it's hey, do you, do you need to look at, do you want to sit down and and look at your medications and have like come up with a new game plan for twenty twenty six to get you healthier, right?

• 10:38Speaker 03

  Like, that's an easy conversation where you can tell a pharmacist can now really be more part of your care plan. And again, kind of create a, I'll say, a better patient relationship with the individual rather than just so transactional at the counter, where it's usually a pharmacy tech handing them a, a medication and then getting that prescription in return, right? This is now having full conversations that feel more collaborative than oftentimes seen at a doctor's office. Because the doctors, no offense, Stefan, doctors are often so busy, you get to see them for two or three minutes and they're on the computer the entire time. This is a conversation.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, and then, you know, like she mentioned, the diabetes management or hypertension, I mean, you can run that report too. In Pi- Pioneer RX or any other PMS. You can also do provider outreach, so maybe there's a couple collaborative physicians in your area that have a lot of patients that have diabetes. Like, that's where you tell them, hey, I am happy to be the in-between here. You know, you're prescribing the, the anti-hypertensive, but I'm here to like help increase the efficacy through counseling with the patient and I can do some even diet and exercise and behavioral change coun- counseling. And his, their patients will have a better outcome because of it. So I think there's that like outreach to the right community providers in the area, letting them know you're doing it.

• 12:05Speaker 02

  We even had some sites that were reaching out to large chain stores in the area. Because those stores aren't doing the services. So let's say patients are going to CVS and they ran out of a prescription for a contraceptive or for, uh, you know, something else. They can then, you know, that pharmacist will know, hey, well, if you go down to, you know, the, your local independent pharmacy, they can provide that service today. You don't have to wait.

• 12:29Speaker 03

  And because we're connected to the Share Scripts Network for new prescriptions, they can still send that patient right back if they want, if the patient still says, well, I want a With my my CVS pharmacy, you're unlocking a whole new clinical service.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Prescribe it to the the original pharmacy if you want, so or or you don't have to. So. The point is it it unlocks all of that and and all of that's free, right? And then local PR. You know, we had a couple customers that were in very rural areas and they knew the local newspaper owners and whatnot, and they ran, you know. PR campaigns locally that said, hey, you know, this pharmacy is stepping up to fill in the gaps. And it not only does that make you look great. But it also increases awareness that you're doing clinical services.

• 13:10Speaker 03

  And yeah, I mean, once, once you. Create that clinical service and people know about you and they're aware of it. That patient provider relationship really grows and expands because people don't. They don't want to switch providers unless they have to.

• 13:29Speaker 03

  But every, a a lot of patients look at prescriptions as a transaction. Rather than they don't realize what's going on behind the scenes, that pharmacists are checking everything and. Making sure that that patient's going to stay safe. All they see is what what they get when they get to the counter, right?

• 13:46Speaker 02

  You counted pills and handed me a bottle, like that's the perception.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  So that's the perception and it's unfortunate, um but realistically, they're doing so much more. And it's just not seen. So that patient provider relationship, at least from a patient perspective. Grows whenever they get more face time with that pharmacist and that can come through clinical services. So. Once they're there, they're, you know, that relationship is just only flourishing more generally what we've seen like. It was so much fun watching the clinical trials and and getting feedback from everybody with the pharmacists as well as the patients. Through those surveys, it was really, it was really enjoyable to get to see what everybody. Had in their experience.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  So all of that is free, right? Like everything we just talked about costs zero dollars, which is awesome. You know, then let's say you want to. You know, grow even further, then you can start paying for, you know, hyper local digital marketing campaigns and things like that if you really want to scale. But really, the truth is like, I I like the the analogy, you know, building. Campfires hard, right? Like it takes time. You need to have the right wood and kindling and you know, the, the right fire starting equipment, whatever. And it's kind of like hard to get started sometimes. But once it's started and you have logs and it's very easy to just kind of keep the fire going by throwing a log in. And that's the same thing as building clinical services in a pharmacy. It's, it's harder, a little bit harder to get started. But once it's started, you just, you just keep it alive.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  Um, and it can continue to grow. And if you want to add two logs instead of one, you can make the fire bigger, right? Um, and that, that happens because of word of mouth, right? Like, once the patients get the service, they like it, they tell their friends and it's becomes exponential. And the other thing is you need a, you need a way to intake the patients digitally. And that's something that really has been lacking. You know, any ad needs a call to action. Anytime a patient is in the store, you need to have an easy way for them to get started, scanning a QR code. And Prism makes that kind of digital front door very easy.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  That's awesome. Implementation, finding our patients. And now someone's listening to this podcast and they're like, timeout. I've done programs before. I have so much confusion around billing. So let's talk about actually getting paid. Why is getting paid for clinical services so difficult for our pharmacies today?

• 16:07Speaker 03

  Because the federal government needs to do something. No, I'm just, well, I mean, I'm not joking.

• 16:13Speaker 03

  That's part of the problem.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  That's part of it.

• 16:14Speaker 03

  Pharmacist lack federal provider status. So it makes it really challenging from a billing standpoint across the board. So it's kind of like rolling the dice anytime they're going to provide a clinical service if, if it's actually going to get accepted. And then there's different rules in every single state of how it needs to be conducted. And it gets really, really kind of messy. Even within each state, there's different regions that request different things and how it's submitted. So um, the confusion from a pharmacist's perspective is very valid and The patient has no idea. They're just, all they know is, is it accepted or not?

• 16:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 16:52Speaker 03

  Right? So that's the difficulty of some of those transactions as well.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  Definitely. And so, you know, ECAPS Act, you know, if that passes, that would give pharmacists federal provider status, which would be huge, right? Because that would open up Medicare, um, which currently can't be billed by a pharmacist at all. Um, and also then once, you know, Medicare does something, when CMS does stuff, the private payers tend to follow. So right now, you know, if a private payer decides they want to pay for pharmacist service, it's kind of like, um, an exception, not the rule. Um, and it's treated as such. And sometimes there even needs to be like more of a value-based care. It's not really fee-for-service, which is much easier for smaller businesses to do. Um, so that, that hopefully will, will all change.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  Um, right now, you know, Medicaid is kind of the, is a great starting point in many states. Uh, but even that gets a little bit tricky because, you know, a lot of states allow the pharmacist to bill Medicaid directly. But if there's a managed care organization for the beneficiary, so if it's not like a direct Medicaid plan, it's run through a managed care organization. You need to do contract negotiation because every third payer, like private insurance or MCO, or even for Medicare. If even once ECAPS passes Medicare Advantage, right, like that has a third party. So anytime that there's a third party, there needs to be contracting.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  And that gets a little bit tricky just because it's mainly designed for large healthcare systems, not necessarily independent pharmacies. You know, CPESN and, you know, is a great organization that, that helps with that side of things. Um, you know, so if, if you're either a part of that organization or you know other pharmacy owners that are, I would definitely reach out to them to get to know your local payer ecosystem. Um, but there is, there is a way to get started submitting claims, but the easiest way to get started is cash. Cash is king from a starting perspective. Um, it makes it so much easier. Um, you know, not all pharmacies have a payer mix that can support that, but many do.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  And you have to remember that privately insured patients pay a co-pay of usually like thirty five to, I don't know, a hundred dollars.

• 19:05Speaker 03

  Twenty five to fifty dollars for a lot of these general appointments.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Right, so thirty five dollars cash pay to walk in a pharmacy today, get expert service and walk out with a prescription for a year. Or like with, you know, maybe three months of the prescription and refills for up to a year. For contraception or whatever else it may be. It's kind of attractive.

• 19:26Speaker 03

  Well, and you know, understand and get, doing all of the paperwork and jumping through all the hoops for insurance and everything else like that. Um, that's only part of it. It's still all the claim reimbursement aspects that are.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Cycle management.

• 19:41Speaker 03

  Revenue cycle management, all of that comes into play and gets really difficult, especially for small businesses, right? Like, having to try to track that uh full element, you, we're watching. Endless doctors, surgeons, everybody else in healthcare, fighting tooth and nail to even get anything approved. For their patients, right? So. We, we know that a lot of doctors are going to uh. Cash and correct primary care models and all of these other things because insurance is just not as feasible. Both from a business standpoint or from a patient actually getting what they need standpoint.

• 20:24Speaker 03

  So not to poo poo completely on insurance, but like it's not something. That should hold you back in the journey of starting clinical services and creating that new line of business. For your small business, right? It should just be kind of a cherry on top that once everything gets passed through legislation and. Pharmacists finally get the provider status federally recognized. Now we can really just like crank it up and to Devon's point of of the fire earlier, you're tossing in like all of the logs at that point.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, at that point, it's the floodgates.

• 20:58Speaker 03

  Right, but you already had to have that fire started, otherwise it's a bunch of noise. So starting.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  Well, otherwise, everyone's trying to start the fire at the same time. There's not enough wood to put like.

• 21:08Speaker 03

  Exactly. You want to start sooner, so and and just grow it, grow it in a way that's going to be feasible, both for your business as well as for the patients. So they're not inundated all at once with pharmacies can do, Dr. Ben now.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  You know, also, even just from a competitive perspective, like having already started, it's like she said, it a lot easier to to scale quickly. And you're going to want to scale when when when those floodgates open, like you're going to want to take advantage of that. Um, but you want that running start. Um, you want the patients to already know that you do this. So that you don't have to start from scratch on that. You need your staff to be optimized and ready to scale. You don't want to go from zero clinical services to ten a day. Like that would completely disrupt everything else. Like you can go from zero to three and three to ten over the course of a year, and it won't disrupt anything because you're going to get your reps in, you're going to get efficient. But you need to, you need, you need to be realistic about kind of getting started now in a way that's feasible.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  So that when, you know, the the the mac, the macroeconomics change, and I believe they will, they kind of have to. The question is when, um, then you're ready to like make the big bucks. Like you can make some money now and then you'll be ready to make the big bucks.

• 22:20Speaker 03

  Yep, small incremental changes.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Yep. I like that. I like that process, but just still thinking this through because I can imagine, once again, pharmacy owners and operators are already thinking about this, and that is like simplifying billing. So what role is Prism going to play in my business, my pharmacy business for simplifying, simplifying billing and reimbursement for our pharmacist-led services?

• 22:49Speaker 03

  So currently, we are working on building out a fully integrated eligibility check and claim submission within the software, within our platform Prism. And we're doing it through a partnership with a clearinghouse because we did not wanna, we did not want to do or try to do our own clearinghouse. We didn't want to have to try to negotiate things on behalf of pharmacists. All of that seems way out of the scope of practice of IT enablement to us anyway. So we wanted the, you know, the pharmacy to handle all of that. So imagine we are just your carrier pigeon to check the eligibility of that patient as well as to submit that claim.

• 23:34Speaker 03

  And so a lot of that data that's already in the system can automate most of the forms. So your insurance form is already, or your insurance claim is already eighty-five to ninety percent complete and you just have a few fields to, to complete and then click the box to say you know that you're submitting a claim. Like that, it makes it, it makes it from a thirty-minute process down to a two to four-minute process, just depending on what you're, you know, what type of services you're submitting for.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Exactly. And so essentially, we're taking all of the encounter data, the patient data, like she mentioned, the payer data, all that stuff, and we're like plugging it into a CMS fifteen-hundred form for you. You can edit it, but it's already in there. And then you're, you're putting a diagnostic code and a procedure code and the amount that you're billing for, because we didn't want to do that on your behalf and, you know, inadvertently create a fraudulent scenario, right? So that's, that's really all, all the pharmacist has to put in. So you don't have to be, yeah, it's pretty easy. And what we're gonna build is, is kind of a coach, like a billing coach that's on the page. Like I, I know many of us millennials and older remember Clippy from Microsoft Word, the little paperclip thing.

• 24:51Speaker 02

  Think of a Clippy that, that tells you, you know, hey, you're, you're billing to Medi-Cal a contraceptive service. Well, guess what? Only these two CPT codes are acceptable. So I see that you've entered a code that's going to get rejected, like maybe choose one of the two that won't get rejected.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:12Speaker 02

  Et cetera.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  That's awesome.

• 25:16Speaker 03

  A non trademark Clippy.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, we haven't decided what its name will be, but we want it to be like as cheesy as Clippy, or at least I do. I think you gotta have fun sometimes too with this stuff.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  That's, that's good. I like that. Alright, so I'm thinking as a pharmacy operator, I talked to so many pharmacy owners at these conferences and they do share staffing as a concern on multiple levels, sometimes the pharmacist level, sometimes the technician level. So talk to us how pharmacies can offer services without having to hire a whole bunch more people in the beginning, but like we've, we've already talked about it, it can scale, but let's talk about it.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, the true magic of Prism really is the fact that it solves the workflow kind of issues. It makes it team-based approach by empowering, you know, non-pharmacist, you know, like pharmacy technicians and stuff to do different tasks that are within their scope of practice to create like a team-based approach to the care of the patient. So it makes it so efficient that you don't need to upscale or upstaff at all to get started. Like that, that should not be a barrier at all. If you get to a point where you have a demand for 20 appointments a day, that's an awesome problem to have, then you can do upstaffing in a way that you're still making, you know, you're still making money, additional money.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  So, you know, we wanted to make it, decrease the barriers to entry by making sure that the efficiency of the system created a scenario where you did not need to upstaff. And so we've achieved that. None of the pharmacies in our clinical trial thought there was any disruption of incorporating the clinical services. And I can't speak about it too much because we're going to publish, but you know, we did look at

• 27:09Speaker 02

  pharmacy staff. Uh, metrics such as satisfaction, job satisfaction and burnout, et cetera, before and after initiating um the services. And it looks like that is is is solid as well. So it doesn't, it doesn't appear to decrease job satisfaction or increase burnout. It it looks like quite possibly, probably the opposite. Um, so you know, you can get started with your current staff. It's very easy to train them because the system is so easy to use. And if you end up with the problem of having too many people wanting services, that's just an amazing problem to have, then you can talk about up staffing.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  I love it. I absolutely love it. I I can see the scalability. I see the track that we're on. From an operational standpoint, what does a typical clinical visit look like when everything is working well?

• 28:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the the patient's get a schedule um and online appointment on myprisonhealth.com. Um, or they can just, you know, scan that QR code that Devon was talking about earlier in that pharmacy. Um, then the patient's going to make their uh prism profile. And, you know, it's essentially like

• 28:26Speaker 03

  their basic demographic information, uh, what type of service they're trying to book an appointment for. And then that appropriate intake form, right? Like, because this is technology, everything is dynamic questionnaire. So if you're going in for diabetes management, we're not going to talk to you about contraception or, you know, vice versa. Um, we might ask, we might ask if you have diabetes on the on the contraceptive form. But, you know, that's it. But um, uh, all of that information is then going from the patient portal into the pharmacy portal and it populates the pharmacist's soap note um automatically. So the pharmacist has yet to do any data entry and eighty percent of their soap note,

• 29:09Speaker 03

  at least eighty percent of it is already done. They just need to add their own notes from the encounter, which then occurs right there. Um, depending on the type of service that's being provided, a pharmacist can, you know, um, use the clinical decision to support to use uh what type of prescription um should be.

• 29:34Speaker 03

  Uh, you know, prescribed to that patient um and depending on the protocols of uh what's what's supposed to be occurring within that appointment um we make sure that there's adherence to both the protocols, the prescriptions to all the different aspects. Um, and then that that prescription information is shipped on over to sure scripts and to the pharmacy management spend uh system for dispensing. So while that prescription is getting filled, um, you had the opportunity to educate the patient, ask more questions, have a more of a uh of a, you know, counseling discussion if if that's in

• 30:15Speaker 03

  um, the workflow for you. And the patient can get their prescription just like normal and walk out. So you know, most encounters um are right around eight to 10 minutes um and pretty quick, pretty, pretty easy. The patient themselves, after they create that profile upfront. Um, that's their profile. So it's not like they have to redo it every single time. A lot of these uh other services that are out there, they didn't want to have to make a patient profile and like up, yeah, patient portal, which has got so much HIPAA compliance and so much, you know, you need SOC two, you need all of these different things that just get really heavy and and difficult

• 31:00Speaker 03

  to achieve. So a lot of these other competing solutions, they just force a patient to submit all of the information over and over and over again. And we went ahead and ripped off the Band-Aid and did all of the compliance pieces. So that patient can, once they have their profile, you are now their provider, just like their doctor is, and they are used to going into a portal and getting all of their medical records, seeing all of the education, seeing all of these different things, booking an appointment, taking their intake forms. You are now competing with all of these amazing healthcare systems that are out there that are charging a wild amount of money to these patients.

• 31:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, and and just having the The portal, like she mentioned, when when you when you sign the encounter, it automates the outputs like the encounter note goes to the patient portal. The educational document, any sort of um you know physician notification to their primary care provider or a referral. So all that kind of care management stuff, um patients can see it. And that's important for a couple of reasons. A, we know it's important from a patient perspective, like they want to have access to that. Um but B, it also is important from a compliance perspective because technically speaking. Federal law prohibits information blocking. So if. You know, if you do render a service to a patient and they want their medical record, you have to provide that to them. And a lot of those other systems, like you can't really do that.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  Um so you're kind of in violation potentially with the federal law.

• 32:32Speaker 03

  Or it's, you know, it's gonna disrupt your workflow because as soon as they ask for all of it, you have a certain amount of time that you need to actually.

• 32:41Speaker 03

  Get it to them, not in their email because you can't just email it, right? It has to be in a HIPAA compliant way. So. Now what? The patient's gonna have to come back in for a.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  Paper copy.

• 32:50Speaker 03

  For a paper copy. So it just gets, it gets messy. Um. And I think every patient. Who's over the age of thirty five essentially has had to deal with this at some point whenever they want their medical records. And there wasn't patient portals back in the day, right? So like.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  Nowadays, like, you know, my parents are in their seventies and I mean, they're all over the patient portals, like people expect it now.

• 33:13Speaker 03

  Oh, they absolutely.

• 33:14Speaker 02

  And you you can't like. You're not gonna look professional, like they're not going to look at you as a provider. If you don't have electronic medical records. It just kind of is what it is. Like, that's how people are trained now.

• 33:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  That makes sense. Uh once again, the layout is really well thought out. And I'm also thinking about um. For pharmacists that aren't offering clinical services other than maybe vaccinations. How do you suggest they get they get started? Because we know that vaccines in the same context and in preparing. Your business to expand. Pharmacists are doing well uh by providing that. So now it's time to add the next layer. Um. So tell us about how do we get started?

• 34:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I I've talked to a lot of pharmacy owners who have been approached, let's say, by people who are like, hey, let's do this like pretty elaborate test to treat. Protocol with CLIA, you know, CLIA waiver and blah, blah, blah. It's like, that's awesome. Like, I'm all for pharmacists doing all of it. However, that's not the best place to get started necessarily, like. It that that's a complicated place to get started.

• 34:25Speaker 03

  It's like wanting to start day trading rather than just doing like a one or two stock trade, right? Like, you're not going to plan, right?

• 34:32Speaker 02

  You don't start trading options from like minute zero, right? Like, you you get there, like, that could be the goal, and that should be the goal. I think everyone, like, in my mind, everyone should have that goal, but. Um, get started with something easier that maybe that requires less oversight and in in integration. So things like contraceptions are are are easy because there's no testing required, right? There's.

• 34:56Speaker 03

  The whole process and to end yourself. It's not adding another third party lawyer to it.

• 35:00Speaker 02

  Right. You don't have to create a a lab core account and then like somehow get them electronic orders and receive results and. Et cetera. It it's it's just easy. So, you know, starting with something like contraception, tobacco cessation. Um, et cetera, um, diabetes management, hypertension management.

• 35:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, if you're not ready yet to, let's say, you're not yet comfortable right away with prescribing, but you still want to be able to provide other services like diabetes management. Or hypertension management, and you know it's going to be impactful for your community by all means. Like Devon's saying, like, start small, start what you're comfortable with.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  Preferably contraception, but um, just pick for the ladies, um, but you know, do what you feel is going to be most comfortable, but don't. Like, start small and expand. I mean, right back to that whole fire, like, get get it burning first, right? And once it catches, it's going to catch, and then you can slowly start adding logs to it. But if you're just going to be like. Pouring gasoline from day one, yeah, you have a bonfire then at that point, right? Where you're

• 36:12Speaker 02

  You're trying to make the Coachella F and D.

• 36:15Speaker 03

  You, you, you poured gasoline on something and it can burn out really quick.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:20Speaker 03

  Right? So.

• 36:21Speaker 02

  Or you can burn out really quick.

• 36:23Speaker 03

  That's the point. But like the, the whole thing is like, do something that's going to be sustainable long-term. Rather than just dump everything on it because it's the hotness this month or next month.

• 36:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:39Speaker 03

  Start small and, and slowly grow it and until you feel comfortable.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  And until your staff feels comfortable, because that's the other thing, right? Like, it's not just, you know, maybe there's a pharmacist pharmacist in charge who, who's going to oversee this. But like it, it's going to affect the entire staff, right? And hopefully in a good way, but probably it'll go better if you start small for that perspective as well.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  I love it. Yeah. And I, I like the fact that you are helping to build this model. And we've gone through steps, you have something that we've really checked the boxes. And this will be in the show notes as well, so that you can go through what those boxes are. But let's talk about what success looks like and taking it in those stages, because we want to get started. We want to get going. But what does success look like for stage, say, one, two, three?

• 37:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I think, you know, success for stage one is like you get it up and going. Your staff is comfortable. You get a couple of appointments. You get good feedback from the patients. Right? You start feeling confident. You have a system in place. You're, you're thinking like, okay, like I, we can do this as a team. Um, and then, you know, stage two is you've built up some patient demands. Your community knows that this exists. You know, you start seeing patients coming in requesting it. Um, spontaneously you start noticing that you're making some new sustainable revenue stream. That has better margins than dispensing that is, you know,

• 38:12Speaker 02

  has nothing to do with the PBM. So you're kind of like gaining some like independent financial independence from, you know, from the oppressors, right? Um, and then stage three is, you know, you start expanding services. Um, your community starts thinking of your pharmacy as their first stop in their healthcare journey for non-emergent.

• 38:33Speaker 02

  You know, either cued or chronic issues. They're coming to you first. You know, you are now not just a place of transactions. You're the provider and they're looking to you at, they're looking at you as a provider. And there's a fundamental shift in how your community views your pharmacy and your staff.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  All right, so pharmacy owners, listening out there, pharmacy operators, technicians who have now been given more responsibility to help grow the business of your pharmacy. And there's so many of them out there. If a pharmacy owner is listening, you're thinking about this, this sounds great, but I'm still hesitant. What are you going to say to those people?

• 39:16Speaker 03

  Well, the pharmacists that are going to adopt and adapt early are going to define the future of the profession.

• 39:27Speaker 03

  And you, you know, like we've been saying, you don't have to have everything perfect at once. You don't have to do everything at once. It's okay to do incremental improvements and incremental services. Start small and add them on. Every single pharmacy that we've teamed with and as, you know, we're fortunate to, fortunate enough to work with, they're all unique and they all have different needs. They all have different patient needs. So, you know, we're happy to talk with you at any point about your unique challenges that you are facing, your patients are facing. So if you reach out to us, we always are interested in learning more about you guys and we hope that you want to learn more about us.

• 40:12Speaker 03

  But, you know, the future of pharmacy is bright when we all get on the same page and we all fight for the same exact cause, which is always going to be affordable access to care for patients and making sure that all of us are treated equitably. That doesn't matter if it's the patient or the pharmacist or the pharmacy tech. Everybody deserves their access and deserves their recognition. So we're just here to be a support tool.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, so if you, if this sounds interesting to you, you know, reach out to us, schedule a demo. I think that's probably the best way to get started, see what we've built, see if it makes sense for you. No pressure, but to do that, you just go to getprismrx.com and we'll get in touch and we'll make it happen.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  You heard it. Get PrismRx.com and you can listen to the other podcast in, if you go to the About section, you'll be able to hear a discussion with a fellow podcaster on our network, Dr. Daniel Plummer, a twerks episode and also parks one and two. Get ready for more revenue in 2026 and doing something that you're for your community that they desperately want and need. Thank you so much for listening to this series and give us a call. Give us a chat. Reach out to GetPrismRx.com.