Business Development Consulting
ESPhA’s team is made up of pharmacy leaders with over 100 collective years of unique, patient centric, pharmacy transformation practice and consulting experience. Whether it’s education, pharmacy training, business development, service implementation, or best practice dissemination, our team continues to further our mission of enhancing community pharmacy value expression. Our consulting strategy has always been to aggregate thought leader, subject matter experts to enhance our community pharmacy value driving opportunities. ESPhA has become a clearinghouse for consultants who not only understand enhanced community pharmacy practice service delivery, but understand how disruptive and valuable these services can be.
Our Experience
340B Patient Care Services
Our team has developed novel ways to utilize and pay community pharmacists for direct patient care services though 340B program savings. The reinvestment of 340B savings in local pharmacist delivered patient care extends a Covered Entity’s reach even further into the communities they serve by increasing patient access to local pharmacist care.
Clinical Trial Innovation and Disruption
Community pharmacists are by nature hardwired into their communities. Community pharmacists often practice where they live, shop, and socialize. This community integration gives the community pharmacy an undeniable ability to utilize LOCAL relationships to engage LOCAL patients in meaningful conversations about health care opportunities.
Community Pharmacy Advocacy
Community Pharmacies provide immense LOCAL value to LOCAL health care ecosystems. ESPhA has made it our mission to advocate for community pharmacy at local, regional, and national levels. From CMS to Capitol Hill, Congressional Testimony to State Capitol Advocacy, Local Public Health to National Publications, ESPhA’s team is dedicated to broadly expressing community pharmacy’s value in today’s health care marketplace.
Drug Wholesalers
Over the past 10 years, ESPhA consultants have delivered value, support, education, and/or additional sales for 5 national and regional drug wholesalers. Whether through quality metric driven purchasing, nationwide education campaigns, regional education seminars, or remote learning, we’re dedicated to expressing alignment between community pharmacy value and wholesaler revenue.
Employer Health Benefit Design
With skyrocketing health care costs employers are searching for ways to reduce cost. Employers can find this value with community pharmacy collaboration. By utilizing local community pharmacists as lead generators with local employers, we’ve worked to help create locally focused employee benefit designs that are locally driven, cost saving to the employer, and most of all community pharmacy friendly.
Grant Administration and Data Analysis
Our team’s unparalleled grant administration work has resulted in not only millions of dollars directed to local public health, non-profits, community pharmacy and community member programs, but tens of thousands of vaccines administered, chronic disease interventions, SDoH screenings, and other services provided to patients in medically underserved areas.
Group Purchasing Organizations
Over a span of 30 years our team has created and managed multiple GPOs, served on GPO boards, and facilitated many GPO – Wholesaler agreements for multiple drug wholesalers and their customers.
Health Care Technology Disruption
Every new business venture requires targeted market analyses, business planning, business development, and specialty insight. When community pharmacies are the targeted disruptive force, many companies, both start up and with an existing market presence, have worked with our team to truly assess, test, and measure the feasibility of their new and disruptive offering.
Managed Care
Managed Care Organizations (MCOs) can benefit greatly by leveraging community pharmacy’s ability to utilize LOCAL relationships to improve patient outcomes, reduce overall costs, and recruit new plan members. Our team has worked with MCOs to lead Pharmacy Transformation Programs across hundreds of pharmacies covering >1,000,000 member lives, service delivery in Medicare Advantage, and Quality Metric improvement in Medicaid populations.
Medication Therapy Management
Quality improvement doesn’t happen in a vacuum and is not sustainable without improved efficiency and reward. Through incentive alignment strategies centered around meaningful metrics, our team successfully increased local, community pharmacy delivered comprehensive medication review (CMR) completion rates across pharmacies in multiple states from 18% to over 50% sustainably.
Opioid Diversion and Abuse Prevention
Our consultant pharmacists have over 40 years of experience in working with patients, prescribers, state governments, Congress, Prescription Drug Monitoring, quality measure development, pharmacist education, law enforcement education, and multijurisdictional prescription drug diversion task force creation, as both pharmacists and law enforcement officers.
Pharmacy Claims Level Data Analytics and Reporting
Community pharmacy data is underutilized in current quality metrics, yet can provide valuable insights into the value community pharmacies can provide to the health care system. ESPhA’s pharmacy level data utilization advocacy and quality metric improvement effort crosswalks have resulted in increases in prescription fills, reduction in retroactive fee exposure, streamline pharmacy workflow efficiencies, and increased profitability for pharmacies, as well as upstream partners.
Pharmacy Practice Transformation
For community pharmacies to align around the value they can provide, more pharmacies need to utilize current best practices. Those best practices then must be improved upon and then disseminated. Whether through, mass trainings via on site boot camps, virtual training events, or individual coaching around medication optimization service implementation, care planning, quality metrics, workflow improvements, or quality metrics, our team has instituted meaningful change in thousands of pharmacies, with thousands of pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, and pharmacy owners.
Pharmacy Recruitment
Our nationwide reach and longstanding pharmacy relationships has allowed us to recruit pharmacies for profitable, non-traditional pharmacy service delivery opportunities across many disciplines. Whether it’s local pharmacy recruitment for a local payer opportunity, regional recruitment for wholesaler programs, or nationwide recruitment for clinical trial affiliated services, our team’s reach is unmatched in the pharmacy industry.
Public Health
The synergies between public health and community pharmacies are often overlooked. Our team has spent years coordinating collaboration opportunities between community pharmacies and national, state, and local public health entities. Whether through Community Health Worker services, SDoH best practices, coordinated screening programs, coordinated bi-directional referral, our team believes public health entities can easily increase their reach by partnering with community pharmacy.
Quality Measure Development and Best Practices
Historically, community pharmacies have struggled to express their value through existing quality measurement systems. For more than ten years our team has been focused on increasing opportunity for community pharmacies through meaningful community pharmacy quality measurement. Whether through leadership at the Pharmacy Quality Alliance (PQA), leadership in PQA measure development, through the National Quality Forum, or direct innovative work with payers, government, or pharmacies, our team is driven to ensure measurement of community pharmacy quality is meaningful to the entire healthcare system both up and downstream.
Vaccine Hesitancy Solutions
Our team has been among the nationally recognized leaders in providing solutions for COVID vaccine hesitancy, outreach, and success in underserved communities. This recognition has resulted in new patient outreach and education revenue opportunities for community pharmacies and their staff.