Distributor News

“The best of a chain combined with the best of an independent pharmacy.”

That’s how Health Mart president Steve Courtman describes Health Mart’s “unique value proposition in the marketplace.” That value, he added, is defined every day in thousands of communities across the United States by the pharmacy owner-operators who serve as the most accessible and most-utilized patient care providers in their local healthcare networks.

Quantity and quality: Those are the two metrics by which any pharmacy operation is measured — quantity of prescriptions dispensed and quality of services provided. Quantity keeps you in business; quality keeps your patients coming back.

It’s a constant challenge for a small operator to score high on both metrics, but that’s exactly what McKesson’s 2013 Pharmacy of the Year Award recipient Parkland Health Mart Pharmacy, of Desloge, Mo., has done.

In 2006, Health Mart was a loosely cohesive buying and marketing group of 268 independently owned and operated drug stores, falling under McKesson Corp.’s store-support umbrella via its purchase of the old FoxMeyer wholesale business in the mid-1990s. Today, just seven years after its reinvention and relaunch by McKesson, Health Mart is the nation’s biggest independent pharmacy franchise and one of the fastest-growing drug store networks of any kind, with more than 3,100 member stores doing business in thousands of communities across the United States.

Like politics, retailing is local. That inescapable fact is behind the ongoing build-up of Health Mart’s local marketing and patient care initiatives as McKesson shifts more store support muscle to the more than 3,100 independent pharmacies allied with the Health Mart network through its Local Marketing Support Program.

Christian Tadrus, PharmD, who has been a pharmacist at Sam’s Health Mart Pharmacies in Moberly, Mo., since 1997, is a believer in using patient adherence strategies to help boost pharmacy operations. And with the implementation of health reform, adherence will be a key differentiator between pharmacies — a measurable indicator of quality of care.

Since the relaunch of the Health Mart franchise in 2005, Health Mart’s road to success has shifted into high gear. Today, Health Mart continues to serve as a key to better pharmacy health with its enhanced suite of tools, resources and solutions to ensure that its members can continue to compete and thrive in the ever-evolving landscape of retail pharmacy.