Manufacturer Direct D2C and the Future of Independent Pharmacy | TWIRx Special Series

SPEAKER_1 (0:05)

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

Todd Eury (0:39)

Hey, the landscape of pharmacy, I don't have to tell you, goodness gracious, is undergoing a massive... Play Tectonics. Structural shift. Our manufacturers...

Are now direct sourcing and direct to consumer, which is known as D2C pharmacy models. They're rapidly accelerating.

And it's been pioneered by organizations like Lilly Direct and Pfizer Direct and these portals and TrumpRx. And it's very confusing. It needs demystified. We need to know. Where it's showing up, how it's being leveled We are going to. talk about how we are going to be able to be able to reach out to people who are having a hard time being leveraged, how it's going to impact our independent community pharmacies, and therefore, we have to reach out to people that know what's going on. I want to introduce a friend of mine who's been in my network for, I'm going to sound old saying this, but it's been over 15 years, maybe 20 years. I don't want to say 20 years, but it could be Shelley Bailey. Welcome to the show. How are you?

Shelley Bailey (1:36)

Oh, hello, Todd. Thanks for having me. Yeah, you just aged both of us, so thanks for that.

But no, thank you for having me here today. I work on different strategic initiatives here at IPC, and some of those initiatives include partnerships with manufacturers, which is why we're having the conversation here today. But I do want to welcome Sammy Salem to this conversation. Sammy?

Sammy Salem (2:00)

Hey, Shelley, how are you? Thank you for having me on this podcast today, Todd.

I am a retail pharmacy owner. I'm also the owner and CEO of Vios Compounding Pharmacy, as well as the executive board member with AAPA, an affiliate under IPC. So pleasure to be on this podcast today, and let's get to it.

Todd Eury (2:24)

All right. So I want to set some groundwork, and I'm going to turn this over to Shelley, because that's why we have you here today is that authority and understanding and like you said, the relationships that you're building with the manufacturer are so key, and things are changing. PBMs are changing, payment models are changing, how things are being paid for, access is changing, supply chain. So when I think of the threat to manufacture to consumer of what that means for education and safety, when I think of the opportunity that manufacturers have to the end all source, which is of course our outputs, our pharmacies out there, there's a lot that goes into this. So kind of open up from the beginning, let's set the stage, direct to consumer in the future of independent pharmacy.

Shelley, give us the groundwork here.

Shelley Bailey (3:16)

Yeah, absolutely. I like to kind of start things usually by talking to people about where things have been up until very recently, kind of with the explosion of direct to consumer or direct to employer. I would say over the last three years, I mean, especially heightened when Pfizer launched their direct program for vaccines, we started this new world where pharmacies were traditionally used to, we have a PSAO, we sign up, we get all of our PBM contracts through that channel. We don't have too much discretion related to that, and we just kind of move forward with claims adjudication. As all these novel programs came out, there wasn't necessarily a role in a more strategic way for retail pharmacy to benefit.

Retail pharmacy kept really helping the nation during a really critical time, where we needed all hands on deck to pull through healthcare access for people.

But as this explosion of D2C really started to happen, retail wasn't wasn't at the table. And so for the last few years, what we find from pharmacy owners, I was a pharmacy owner myself, which is how I met Todd probably in 2010 or something. But while retail pharmacy was out there saving lives, these innovative models started to pop up. And until recently, retail pharmacies just haven't been really strategically included in the D2C or D2E space. And so we'll talk more about it throughout our discussion. But I think it's really exciting now to be at a position where, through partnerships like what we built here with IPC, that we can really bring retail pharmacy to the table related to D2C that clearly benefits patients, it benefits the pharmacy, it benefits local payers in a more strategic way in the past. And I guess from my perspective, Sammy, as you have still your pulse on working the bench too, seeing all this play out in real time, have you seen any shift from what commercial payers are doing, what cash pay is doing, and then also where things are headed to D2C? And are you finding that you've been historically carved out? Are you finding that you've had to refer people out because you couldn't match the D2C price? What are you really seeing in real time up until some of these new programs that you've been participating in?