Navigation

Pharmacy Schools In Georgia

Eckerd's pharmacy roots are showing.

With the deal-making over and the merger of Eckerd with Brooks Pharmacy behind it, Brooks now can concentrate on the more than 1,500 Eckerd stores that came with the deal. And one of the highest priorities, according to Brooks' top pharmacy executive, will be to restore Eckerd's primary mission in pharmacy and health care.

"We are drug store guys, and it's our intention to refocus on that, particularly from a pharmacy perspective," said C. Daniel Haron, vice president of pharmacy and professional affairs for Brooks. That shift in focus is rippling across every aspect of Eckerd's operation, from the stronger health care message that will be conveyed by its weekly circulars to the name on the letterhead.

"You'll see the term Eckerd Pharmacy--not I Eckerd Corp. or Eckerd I Drug," Haron told Drug Store News. "'We have an opportunity to re-energize the stores and the pharmacy teams with our focus on pharmacy.

"We want to operate the company in one way, and obviously that is an evolutionary process," said Haron. "In my area, that means building one pharmacy team, and we're still putting that team together. It's my hope we have that completed by late September or October."

Haron said Brooks is working to retain a number of management and purchasing staffers on the pharmacy side at Eckerd and will move those people to its Rhode island headquarters or to field management. "We have made offers and gotten some acceptances, and we'll continue to do that," he said. "And Dan Miller, vice president of pharmacy operations with Eckerd, will be coming with us, and I'm very excited about that."

Miller will continue to oversee pharmacy operations, he said.

In all, Haron said the pharmacy team is focused on four critical, near-term goals for Eckerd's pharmacy department.

"First, we're going to be refocusing on service standards. That may mean courtesy in the way we treat customers or ensuring we have adequate stock of the product."

With the addition of Eckerd's eastern stores and ancillary operations, added Haron: "We have a lot of things going on--patient-care activities, a repackaging facility in Puerto Rico and one in Largo, [Fla.], a therapeutic support center in Pittsburgh, a specialty pharmacy. But at the end of the day, it comes down to our ability to execute at store level with the prescription customer. So Job One is to focus on pharmacy and improve the prescription trend at Eckerd, and that clearly starts with service."

The second area of focus, said Haron, will be a determined effort to build and maintain a satisfied and motivated team of pharmacists and technicians. "We have certain areas where we want to improve our staffing level, and that means things like ensuring we get more involved with schools of pharmacy and that they know who the new Eckerd Pharmacy is.

"This period of uncertainty at Eckerd over the last couple of years has created a question in the minds of students making career decisions," Haron noted. "We want to make sure from a staffing perspective that we become a career choice."

Brooks' own track record should help in its drive to attract and retain professionals, added Michel Coutu, Brooks chairman and chief executive officer. "If you are a pharmacist at Brooks, you work in a very nice environment," he asserted. "We have a glassed-in consultation area, and we were the first drug chain to give our pharmacists a regular lunch break.

"All of our focus at Brooks has been about the quality of professional life in the pharmacy ... [and] to give our pharmacists the best possible tools to take care of the customers," Coutu maintained. "We have what I believe is the right ratio of pharmacists and technicians, and we train our technicians. We have also spent a lot of money to develop one of only two truly centralized pharmacy systems in the country; Brooks and Walgreens are the only two chains that have a pure, centralized, live pharmacy system."

Haron cited two more immediate goals for the Eckerd pharmacies: elevating prescription counts--which have lagged behind industry standards in recent years--and getting both Eckerd and Brooks pharmacies on a common technology and communications platform.

"We will migrate the Eckerd stores over to the Brooks pharmacy system ... [within] a timetable of 24 to 36 months for the total chain rollout," said Coutu.

The new system will be a hybrid of Brooks' fully interactive pharmacy system, called Pharmacy Care, and the Tech Rx system Eckerd was developing in partnership with NDC Health.

"There are a lot of similarities between our system and the one Eckerd was working on," said Haron. The chainwide rollout will give all pharmacists such advanced features as scan-based tracking of prescriptions, pill imaging, automated grouping of prescriptions by patient and order, and the ability to integrate with interactive voice response and Internet-based ordering systems, and with the SureScripts e-prescribing network.

Equally important, the system, when fully integrated, will allow Brooks and Eckerd pharmacists from Maine to Georgia instant access to any patient's records, no matter which of the company's pharmacies the prescription originated in. It also will incorporate best practices from both sides --including Brooks' data-mining capabilities and Eckerd's ability to track patient prescription patterns and outcomes--via a powerful, centralized database. "That's very important from a patient-care standpoint," said Haron.

Those patient care efforts should continue, he added. "It is not our intention to go backward on anything. So we will continue to try to support some of the initiatives Eckerd has under way in the area of patient care."

At the core of many changes will be a fundamental cultural shift aimed at improving customer service and local accountability by spreading out decision making among pharmacy supervisors and staff. "We do have to change the methodology and decentralize the activities here and really empower people more," said Haron enthusiastically. "The biggest goal that excites me is getting the pharmacy teams at store level excited about what lies ahead and recognizing that they have the total commitment of our organization."

Michel Coutu echoed that assertion. "We are going to bring it back to that mentality of pharmacy first. Pharmacy is 70 percent of our business ... [so] we're making sure that the stores are going to be organized to fulfill pharmacy customers' needs."

On the other hand, Haron cited several highly regarded Eckerd pharmacy programs that he said probably would remain in the combined company, including a groundbreaking Courtesy Refill program, under which patients on maintenance medications could sign up for automatic refills and reminders.

"I want to focus on business building, driving scripts and retaining customers," Haron said. "The Courtesy Refill program is a great program for that."

Eckerd also developed a "lost-patient process" that flags customers who haven't refilled their prescriptions at Eckerd pharmacies in a while and contacts them to see why.

"We don't track that as definitively as Eckerd does," he acknowledged.

"I don't think of this as Brooks buying Eckerd," Haron said. "In a way, I see it as the fact that we've kind of become Eckerd. We're able to take the best practices from each.

"I'm excited about it because when you think about what Eckerd is, you've got a lot of folks who have brought some of the best practices from [acquired] chains like Thrift, Fay's and Genovese," he said.

For its part, what Brooks can bring to Eckerd's pharmacy operation is focus. "In an effort to drive sales and top-line growth, there was probably more of a focus on the front of the store" under J.C. Penney, Haron said. "The focus was lost on pharmacy. We're very pharmacy-focused, and we have an exciting opportunity here."

COPYRIGHT 2004 Reproduced with permission of the copyright holder. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group