Cardinal Health Discusses Pharmacy Solutions

Debbie Weitzman, president of pharmaceutical distribution at Cardinal Health, speaks to Pharmacy Times^® about the services that Cardinal Health offers across the distribution model during the Cardinal Health Retail Business Conference in Nashville, TN.

PT: Can you talk about the current distribution model and what it means for payers, hospitals and patients?

Debbie Weitzman: I would say that there are two paths for the patient. [One way] could be through the hospital through some sort of emergency situation or a planned surgery of some kind […], and then there’s typically a discharge management process. Every step of the way, Cardinal has a touchpoint with the provider, i.e. the hospital, the long-term care facility, and retail setting.

In my position, we actually organize ourselves around what we call, “class-of-trade,” [meaning the] touchpoints where you need a pharmacy to be supporting the patient. We have distribution to [integrated delivery networks (IDNs)] [or] free-standing hospitals. We also have your basic distribution, which is where a pharmacy places an order and we curate their order so they’re buying what they’re supposed to buy. It seems like a nice simple process, but there are many hands behind the scenes that go into making it a good order and getting it out the door of our facility to hospitals or out-patient facilities.

The other path is simple: as people age, they need maintenance medication. Things such as cholesterol or high blood pressure won’t typically require hospitalization, but their doctor wants them to be on the medication for their health. That’s a captive, retail experience for that patient and we are very present as well in that class of trade. Everything through our large chains, customers, regional chains, to our 20,000 retail independent community pharmacies, we service these pharmacies and make them better.

PT: When you talk about these touchpoints, is it more that Cardinal Health oversees operations or do they provide specific programs or products?

Weitzman: Well, what we consider the product are the drugs themselves. We don’t make any drugs, we only source our drugs from those manufacturers who make them, put them in our warehouse, and move them out for our patients. What we develop and what we call solutions are sort of a suite of different services that go beyond just distributing the products. In the acute setting, we have the capability to do complete outsourcing of a hospital’s in-patient pharmacy to us […] We have approximately 150 IDNs that I mentioned previously, where there is an arrangement in place to manage some part of their pharmacy. The idea behind that is better clinical outcomes, where we can support and manage IDNs of different sizes.

For our retail pharmacies, we run the gamut. We have tools that can help them manage their inventory better, and [a] proprietary system called Cardinal Inventory Manager (CIM). We have lots of clinical tools too that are like programs in a box, so if you own a pharmacy and you want to start getting into flu vaccinations, we can help train you [...] and procure the things you need to be paid for the program as well. We also have a medical billing package, where pharmacies can become certified to bill through the pharmacy things outside of the drug benefit.

We’re essentially trying to make the pharmacy more efficient by freeing up time, since pharmacists are very highly trained professionals in the health field and they can do a lot based on their education and their experience. There are studies that show that people go to their doctor 3 to 4 times a year, but they go to their pharmacist sometimes weekly. So that touchpoint is really important for the patient in terms of taking care of themselves.

PT: How does Cardinal Health interact effectively with independent retail pharmacies in order to better engage with and serve communities?

Weitzman: The idea of customizing the experience for the patient. Healthcare is so personal and local. They want someone they can talk to, who they can have a relationship with because there’s trust involved. Our retail independents are incredibly responsive to the needs of their communities. A retail pharmacy in New York City would be wildly different than one in rural Indiana. There are areas of our country that need a healthcare professional of any kind, and there’s others where any healthcare expertise you want is steps away in a big city, and in that case, you want great service.

How does Cardinal Health strengthen the relationships between health care providers, payers, pharmacies, and patients?

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