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Opportunities, challenges, and how Cardinal Health empowers independent pharmacies to thrive in a complex healthcare landscape

Pharmacy Technology & Management Review editor Will Lockwood caught up with Tony Steiner, vice president of programs and solutions for Cardinal Health’s pharmaceutical and specialty solutions segment, at Cardinal Health’s Retail Business Conference (RBC) 2024 in Chicago. In this conversation, Steiner addresses key issues and opportunities for independent community pharmacies. He also dives into the challenges facing community pharmacies and how technology can help and outlines Cardinal Health’s strategies for empowering independent pharmacies to thrive in a complex healthcare landscape with a focus on data-driven solutions and patient care.

Pharmacy Technology & Management Review: What are the key technology addressable challenges for community pharmacy right now?

Tony Steiner: Community pharmacy is a challenging environment right now, with many hurdles across the business. Performance, financial and resource management are critical areas. Thankfully, we have technology solutions to help address these challenges. Our goal is to empower pharmacies to focus on patient care, by spending less time on backend operations. And so, at Cardinal Health, we are looking both at their current situation and future needs.

We want to provide independent pharmacies with solutions that provide actionable data to help drive efficiency, optimize business performance, and ultimately improve patient care. Technology integrates with existing systems to support informed decision-making. Community pharmacies vary widely, but technology helps them make informed choices about operations and strategic goals.

I'm a data-driven person. Relevant data is essential for effective decision-making. We've pivoted our approach to provide data-driven support, enabling pharmacies to impact their communities effectively.

PTMR: Good data is certainly more critical than ever if you want to be able to make good decisions. And there’s the big picture, but then there's more granular data, right?

Tony Steiner: There's definitely value in both. Independent pharmacies need data that helps them with their focus on their specific patients and the communities they serve. However, being part of a larger network provides access to data and insights from other pharmacies. This helps them make informed decisions, based on data that reflects more than just their store or local information.

PTMR: It’s important to be able to benchmark, then.

Tony Steiner: Yes. And Cardinal Health has retail advisory boards that facilitate knowledge sharing among independent pharmacies through exchanging insights with peers. Then we also offer technology-driven data that allows benchmarking by giving pharmacies access to industry-data and insights, expanding their perspective beyond their local market. In fact, we offer many services and solutions, and we're constantly developing new ones. To stay ahead of the rapidly changing market, we must continuously evolve.

PTMR: Can you touch on some specific technologies that are especially current right now?

Tony Steiner: I’d start off by pointing to our reconciliation, reimbursement consulting services [RCS], inventory management, and pharmacy marketing services. These solutions address key challenges faced by pharmacies, such as revenue maximization and efficient inventory management.

Cardinal Health™ Reconciliation and RCS are really there to ensure that these pharmacies are not leaving any dollars on the table. These are examples of how we're walking alongside independent owners to bring the scale and the knowledge of Cardinal Health to them so that they can focus on patient care instead of wondering: Am I in a good spot? Did I leave any revenue on the table?

Cardinal Health™ Inventory Manager, also known as CIM, is a service that’s very near and dear to me because of my supply chain background. There's a lot of capital that sits on a pharmacy's books because of inventory sitting on their shelves. And if it's not the right inventory, if they're not restocking appropriately, if they're not understanding shifts in the market to make sure they have the right product at the right time and in the right place, then that's going to cost them money in the end. Being without inventory technology like CIM can also mean that a pharmacy does not have as much time and resources focused on patient care.

Then there’s Cardinal Health™ Pharmacy Marketing Advantage. This is a fun one for me, because it’s where you get into a lot of the digital marketing components. Pharmacy is a rapidly changing environment from a communication and a marketing standpoint. What worked 10 years ago to bring the community into your independent pharmacy probably doesn't work the same today. And so we've got solutions built to really help enable independent pharmacy outreach into the community.

In the end, our goal with all these services is to free up pharmacists' time so they can focus on patient care.

PTMR: Let's talk about where the big opportunities are for independent pharmacy, and how having the right access to the right programs, the right services, the right technology, the right partners can really help them move ahead with these opportunities.

Tony Steiner: Sure. This is where I think Cardinal Health has a unique ability to really walk alongside independent pharmacy. Our broad reach across the healthcare industry gives us a unique perspective on market trends. We can leverage this knowledge to help independent pharmacies understand industry changes, anticipate future developments, and position themselves for success. Data analysis is crucial for identifying trends and making informed decisions. I think by ensuring that we have the right perspective, the right focus, it's exceptionally valuable for an independent pharmacist.

Cardinal Health also collaborates with other vendors to develop innovative solutions for pharmacies. Our partnership with Outcomes has been particularly successful in the realm of reimbursement consulting services [RCS]. Outcomes' platform is instrumental in this area. We're also exploring other ways to leverage their expertise.

Additionally, we're exploring the opportunities that may arise from deploying the Cardinal Health™ InteLogix™ Platform for independent pharmacy in order to utilize artificial intelligence [AI] and machine learning to address supply chain challenges. By leveraging our partnership with Palantir Technologies and its Foundry platform, we aim to provide pharmacies with data-driven insights to optimize operations and respond to market changes. This approach is similar to our successful work with hospitals and health systems, and while the InteLogix™ Platform is not yet operational for community pharmacy, we believe it can be adapted to benefit this space.

PTMR: Tell me more about what the InteLogix™ Platform would do for independents.

Tony Steiner: It allows us to use AI and machine learning to enable a more rapid response to changes in the pharmaceutical supply chain. If you understand the macro trends that are happening when it comes to vaccines, for example, then you're able to act differently and develop a better strategy for how to address the needs within your community. We're excited to be exploring opportunities for how we pull the ways in which the InteLogix™ Platform is providing significant savings for hospitals and health systems and packaging that for our retail independents to grow and set themselves up for where they need to be.

PTMR: Can you give me a high-level overview of what the InteLogix™ Platform does?

Tony Steiner: Definitely. The InteLogix™ Platform consolidates various data sources, including transactional data that comes from Cardinal Health and external market data from a wide array of sources. By applying AI and machine learning, we bring all this data into one package and analyze it to identify shifts in disease trends and patterns. This approach has been successful in the hospital setting, helping us understand regional disease shifts and develop insights into how to best change operations to account for them. Now, as I mentioned, we're exploring how to pivot and adapt this technology for community pharmacies to address similar challenges and leverage data-driven insights.

PTMR: And so the idea is for independent community pharmacies to have access to data-informed forecasting that helps them position themselves to meet developing needs specific to their market and their patients in, for example, immunizations or clinical programs?

Tony Steiner: The ideal is for every independent pharmacy to operate a little bit differently based on their community’s needs. Getting this level of insight is a challenge for independents because they don’t typically have enough locations to provide the data you’d need to identify important trends. This is where aggregated data and benchmarking come in. Through the InteLogix™ Platform, we're able to ingest large amounts of national data and then boil that down into areas that allow us to provide pharmacies with actionable, benchmarkable insights based on what’s happening within their communities. Then when they're interacting with other pharmacists or with providers, they just have a better set of information sitting behind their understanding of the trends in their market.

PTMR: From a retail pharmacy perspective, this sounds to me as if it's another step to increase the sophistication with which pharmacies manage inventory. We’re getting farther and farther away from the days of managing inventory based on intuition, or even simple historical data or more sophisticated perpetual inventory tools.

Tony Steiner: Our strategy is ultimately very simple: The patient is the focus at the end of the day. And by focusing on that and understanding how other pharmacists across different areas have operated, we're able to really bring together all of these different components into something that really will provide lasting value.

PTMR: There’s one last topic I’d like to ask you to address. What is the best way for independent pharmacies to navigate the challenge of finding the right partners, technology or otherwise, and then building and maintaining relationships with them?

Tony Steiner: Every pharmacy sector has financial problems, resource problems, and performance management problems. And while there are unique flavors of these problems, it all comes down to this when you’re interacting with vendors or technology: to effectively address challenges, Cardinal Health must adopt a macro perspective and develop scalable solutions that can be adapted to each individual sector.

However, at Cardinal Health, we know we can't lose the unique perspective of each of the individual pharmacies we work with. If we’re not able to interact at that level, we’ve failed because a retail independent is never going to operate the same as a health system. We must maintain a tailored approach, because a one-size-fits-all solution is not effective. At Cardinal Health we aim to leverage our resources and relationships to empower community pharmacies to thrive and prioritize patient care. 

Editor’s note: This story was previously published on the Pharmacy Technology & Management Review website.