Independent Corner: Interacting with Health Systems

Community Pharmacy Consultant Bruce Kneeland speaks with Kevin DeMass, RPh, President of Apothecary Shoppe, Salt Lake City, UT, discusses how the pharmacy staff interacts with physicians, health care providers, and payers on a daily basis.

Bruce Kneeland: So you must have somebody on your team who’s visiting with physicians and providers, and I suspect even payers, to kind of let people know what you can do. Tell me a little bit about that process.

Kevin DeMass, RPh: Well, you’re looking at one of them. I do a lot of that, and then we’ve got lots of staff back behind me. We have physicians that come in all day long. We’re right in the middle of the campus, so physicians can come in, they can grab a soda, they can grab it and talk to us, they can come in and pick up their own medication. We can talk to them to kind of build that network. And we also go out into the community, and we also go in to third party payers, and we work with the company Elevate Provider Network that goes in and helps us negotiate contracts with payers so that we can get that special service that you need for your plan.