Health Mart’s operations chief tracks build-up in local support

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.

“In the past, we’ve focused a little more on Health Mart as a national brand,” acknowledged Chuck Wilson, VP operations for Health Mart. But this year, he said, Health Mart has modified its national outreach based on its understanding “that our customers have a local presence, so the goal is to take our energies and put them toward supporting them on a local basis.”

To help its franchisees take advantage of Health Mart’s new local marketing offerings, the company modernized its content and provided new tools to let store owners “talk to the population more where they are.” For instance, he said, “we’ve added a lot of social media tools, so if they have patients they want to reach that way, we’ve given them content they can use to make that link with the customer.”

“It’s really important for our customers to get to their patients in the way that they’re used to receiving information, and if that happens to be via the digital medium, then we need to make sure we have the tools for our customers,” Wilson added. “Our pharmacists and owners don’t have the time to invest to figure out how to do it, so we can provide them with the tools to make it easier for them to contact their patients.”

In addition, he said, “we’ve made access to the local marketing support tools a lot easier, and we’ve simplified the process for taking advantage of advertising matching funds that help support some of their initiatives.”

The more links that store owners have with their patients, Wilson added, the more they can “help patients understand all the services available to them.”

In turn, the stronger emphasis on each franchisee’s presence as a locally based community health provider helps drive Health Mart’s national presence, as well. “Our customers are all locally owned, so their identity really exists within their community,” Wilson said. “This helps the brand grow nationally one store and one local market at a time. And, the easier we make it for them to get their messages out, the more we can grow nationally.”

Health Mart owner-franchisees are facing competition that is “bigger and better than ever” in a crowded marketplace, said the operations chief. So defining their presence in the marketplace demands a balanced marketing effort that deftly blends Health Mart’s advantages as a national pharmacy network with the emphasis on each store’s unique characteristics. “It’s important for us to enable our stores to compete in their marketplace, but do it in a way that’s going to match the services they offer, as well as the community in which they operate,” Wilson agreed. “It wouldn’t do a lot of good for us to go out there with some national message that wouldn’t necessarily pertain to the practice they run.”

At the McKesson ideaShare conference in June, Wilson talked about the company’s effort to sharpen the focus on Health Mart owners’ local marketing prowess — and to strengthen their ability to deliver on three key performance metrics:

• Improving patient adherence, including providing refill reminders and medication synchronization programs that simplify the refill process;


• Identifying gaps in care — specifically among diabetic patients; and


• Boosting generic dispensing rates to boost profitability and lower overall health costs.

“We’ve tried to focus on moving beyond transactional health care for a long time,” Wilson told franchisees. “We decided what we needed to focus on were three critical components of health reform.”

Recently, Health Mart also gave its store design its first major, comprehensive upgrade in seven or eight years. “We’ve been operating under the same store design since Health Mart relaunched in 2005 and 2006,” Wilson said. “There have been a lot of changes within retail pharmacy since then — not only on the consumer side and the demands they’re making on the retail setting, but also in the delivery of health care. So we wanted to step back and take a fresh look at this.”

In its bid to modernize the Health Mart prototype, McKesson followed a couple of basic principles — making the store easier to shop and making the pharmacist more accessible.

As the healthcare delivery model evolves, Health Mart continues to focus on supporting its customers’ ability to take advantage of the changes. Simplifying execution and making it easier to advertise the stores’ services is helping to position these pharmacies as an integral part of improving patient outcomes.