Q&A: NCPA Announces Independent Community Pharmacy Consortium for Government Engagement
Kurt Proctor, BS Pharm, PhD, CCHS, President of the NCPA Innovation Center, discussed his organization’s efforts in launching the Independent Community Pharmacy Consortium for Government Engagement.
Stemming from lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Community Pharmacists Association (NCPA) announced on Thursday the formation of the Independent Community Pharmacy Consortium for Government Engagement—a network designed to engage community pharmacies and other pertinent drug supply chain entities during future public health emergencies.
“[The Consortium] is bringing together pharmacy services administrative organizations, wholesale distributors, and pharmacy management system vendors to streamline the engagement of community pharmacies in public health initiatives,” read an NCPA news release. “Building on the vital role played during the COVID-19 pandemic, independent community pharmacies across the United States are taking proactive steps to enhance their readiness for future public health emergencies.”
NCPA announced on Thursday the formation of the Independent Community Pharmacy Consortium for Government Engagement. | image credit: Gibster / stock.adobe.com
Kurt Proctor, BS Pharm, PhD, CCHS, President of the NCPA Innovation Center, recently joined Drug Topics to discuss the newly formed consortium.
“It's an effort to make it easier to include independents because that could be challenging,” he told us. “It could be challenging for those who don't understand how independents are organized and aggregated, and who serves them for what functions, etc. It's meant to be a one-stop-shop for engaging independents.”
Read on to learn more about the NCPA’s Independent Community Pharmacy Consortium for Government Engagement. Also, stay tuned for a full-length podcast version of our conversation with Proctor, touching on several themes highlighted by the NCPA Innovation Center’s brand-new initiative.
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Drug Topics: Can you start by discussing what the consortium is and how it came to be?
Kurt Proctor: We worked with a number of entities as we went through the COVID-19 pandemic, and lots of them worked with each other and helped each other as we went through it. If you go back to the beginning, we learned quickly that we needed to help make including independents easier for government entities. They could call a chain and get whatever stores they have, but it's a different type of entity to engage the independents. As the experience came out of that, we spent a lot of time educating the government about independents—how they're aggregated, how they contract, etc—as we got into the pandemic. As we were winding down in the pandemic, we said, “Okay, we need to be even better prepared as we go forward to meet the needs of the public, independent community pharmacies’ customers, and the communities that they serve.” Therefore, we have to take yet another step forward in making it easy to do business with independents and easy for government entities to include independents in their response. I think independent pharmacies really proved to many that they reach very important populations and that they're a very integral part of an overall response to [an] emergency situation.
In the pandemic, we [didn’t] know what the next response [needed] to be. We started out the pandemic needing to contract and needing to figure out how we're going to engage. The federal government was putting together a federal retail pharmacy partner program. They had contracts that were written for chains and they weren't written for independents or aggregators of independents. We had to kind of educate them about what that was like, what these entities are like, what it takes to engage them, and what relationships exist between aggregators and independent pharmacies. We got over that hump and we [we're] doing the vaccinations. Then, all of a sudden, we had free masks to distribute. It became not a contracting issue as much as it was a physical distribution issue. We went beyond the partners that were in the federal partnership program, certainly included them, but we got the 6 regional wholesalers involved in distributing the free masks and connected them with the strategic national stockpile and arranged for those certain pharmacies who are served by those 6 regional wholesalers to participate and be able to reach their pharmacies and their pharmacies’ customers. Again, it's an effort to make it easier to include independents because that could be challenging. It could be challenging for those who don't understand how independents are organized and aggregated, and who serves them for what functions, etc. It's meant to be a one-stop-shop for engaging independents.
Drug Topics: Aside from the pandemic and independent pharmacies shining as a valuable resource for public health, is there another factor or event that spurred a need for this consortium?
Kurt Proctor: No, I don't think so. Not anything specific. We go back in history to other pandemics, other responses, but it was really this one. One of the events that caught our attention quite strongly was, at the beginning of the pandemic, seeing just the big change represented in the White House Rose Garden ceremony. [We were] saying, “Okay, how are they not engaging independents in this?” Because, especially with the populations that they were most concerned about reaching, that's who our members and independent pharmacies serve to a great degree. It was that visualization from the rose garden that said, along with the others who were represented there from the big-box chains, we need to make sure that we have a way for government entities to engage independents more easily in mass.
The entities that were involved in the Federal Retail Pharmacy Partnership Program cooperated with each other quite a bit in terms of sharing things and talking about “How are you handling this? How are you doing that”—all for the good of the country and the good of the patients that we're serving. I think it demonstrated that there were times and there were topics where it made sense to work together and it made sense to put a common, singular face on independents. We also learned that it's tough to get folks who don't deal with pharmacies all the time to understand independents and understand how they're aggregated. There's such a big learning curve. Folks that had just incredibly large sets of responsibility, we would explain the same thing to them multiple, multiple times. You can't necessarily expect them to remember it all. So, [we’re] putting ourselves out there as the experts about how community pharmacies are organized, who they're affiliated with, how they're aggregated, so that the government doesn't have to try to understand that, because they never will, frankly. [It’s] just [letting] them know that here we are as the easy button again for independents.
Drug Topics: With its focus on bolstering public health, who would you say will benefit most from the consortium’s efforts? Would you say it’s patients, community pharmacies, NCPA partners, or just public health initiatives in general?
Kurt Proctor: Well, we're not trying to replace anything that exists and that functions well today, in terms of the relationship between pharmacies, the business partners they have, and the folks who you can think of them being aggregated by. It's more to be there and to be ready when something happens and somebody needs to engage independents broadly. Again, we’re the easy button for them to do that. At this point, we don't have specific initiatives of our own to undertake other than readiness and making sure that, if the call comes, that we are able to respond to it, that we're able to engage the right people. Depending on what the need is—whether it's contracting, distribution, or dissemination of education and information—all of those things we can facilitate quite easily with a solid understanding of who the players are and how this marketplace works.
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