The Benefits of ScriptCenter Kiosks for Pharmacies, Part 1

Drug Topics® sat down with Asteres® Chairman and BioIQ CEO, Sean Slovenski to discuss 24/7 automated pharmacy pickup. Asteres® develops ScriptCenter kiosks and lockers for secure and safe pickup of prescriptions and healthcare products.

ScriptCenter allows your pharmacy staff to maintain control of filling and checking prescriptions, while ScriptCenter takes care of the secure storage, tracking, pickup, and payment of your pharmacist-filled prescriptions.

Sean was named Healthcare Leader of The Year by the US Chamber of Commerce in 2015 and in 2019 as the 7th most influential person in healthcare out of the top 100 by Modern Health Magazine.

Drug Topics®: Today I am joined by Sean Slovenski, Chairman of Asteres® Inc. and CEO of BioIQ. Thank you for joining me today. I'd love to jump into today's topic.

Sean Slovenski: Sure! Nice to meet you.

Drug Topics®: Can you start by telling me a little bit about your background?

Sure, I've been in the healthcare space for about 30 years, been a serial entrepreneur in that timeframe, small companies and large.

So, I started my first business on my own and sold that about 10 years ago to Humana, a large insurer in the Medicare space. And then just before jumping into BioIQ to help with this pandemic, I was the President of Healthcare for Walmart.

Drug Topics®: Wow. How is your experience in behavioral health and being at home diagnostics? And in these various industries, sort of driven to the work that you do today with Asteres? And have you seen any, like gaps in the field? And what sort of led you to where you are now?

Sean Slovenski: Yeah, yeah. So yes, it'd be a few things. But part of the issue with most things in health care is access, affordability, and access. Yeah, there's 1000 other things that go around it, but those are the two that tend to be the biggest barriers.

And with what we do, bringing these, in essence, prescription ATM machines, to remote locations out in the military, out in rural settings, you know, even at grocery stores and places like that, that need extra support, because their pharmacies are not open as long as they used to be pre pandemic. Or in some cases, many pharmacies and retail locations have closed, because they couldn't find workers to keep them open.

So, having access to your medication is pretty primary, to keep your health where it needs to go, whether it's behavioral health related medications or physical health related medication. So that's the interesting thing, we can mail stuff to people's homes.

And that's a great option. But people do like to go out kind of tired of being in their houses. So having a pickup destination where you can get your prescription filled, and then head on to the rest of your day is really quite convenient for people.

Drug Topics®: Right, that makes a lot of sense. Going off of that, you mentioned accessibility, can you kind of explain what the script center kiosk is and go into that?

Slovenski: You know, this simplest way to understand it, maybe two analogies. We've all used ATM machines, alright, automatic teller machines. Well, again, showing my age back in the 80s and 90s. That was a weird thing. You know, banks were like, no one's ever going to use that, because they want to come to the bank.

Now who goes to a bank anymore, right? They're all hitting an ATM machine somewhere. So, this works the same way very much. different laws in different states decide how you can dispense the medications and the process of doing that. But essentially, it's an ATM machine. Instead of spitting out dollar bills it will spit out your prescription prescribed by your doctor as a pickup location.

The other option with our machine is more like an Amazon locker system where the medication your prescription actually would get delivered to a locker within a bank of lockers at a store or community center.

And just like picking up a package at an apartment complex you get a little code, and you type in your name, and it verifies you know, you through, your face recognition or a code that you have and hey, locker 32 a. There's your penicillin for you today is your blood pressure medicine and the locker pops open for you. So, an ATM machine and Amazon locker machine kind of combined into one.

Photo retrieved from https://asteres.com/