In praise of a pharmacy champion, trailblazer
Usually it takes some time for any individual’s full impact on their company, their profession and their industry to come into focus after that person has moved on.
Such may be the case with Robert I. Thompson, who stepped down Sept. 18 from his position as EVP of pharmacy at Rite Aid. But this much is clear: Thompson played a key role in the reinvention and revitalization of Rite Aid’s healthcare business and mission in recent years, which was clearly a major factor in the company’s remarkable turnaround and return to retail viability.
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For his leadership in the renewal of Rite Aid’s retail pharmacy business and his many efforts on behalf of pharmacy practice, patient health and a higher level of patient care by pharmacists throughout his career, Thompson has been named the DSN Pharmacy Innovator of the Year. And in another fitting cap to his career, Thompson was recently named the Harold W. Pratt Award winner for 2015 at the National Association of Chain Drug Stores Total Store Expo in August.
Thompson, a 1976 graduate of the University of Georgia School of Pharmacy, is a chain pharmacy veteran and healthcare industry entrepreneur who forged a long and successful career at Revco D.S. and Rite Aid. He joined Rite Aid in July 2004 as the company was still struggling to emerge, following the conviction of former senior executives in the wake of a massive accounting fraud that forced the company to erase some $1.6 billion profits and sent its stock price and debt rating reeling.
Amid those setbacks, and still carrying a heavy debt load from earlier acquisitions — along with mounting credit pressure, competition and declining same-store sales in many markets — Rite Aid’s future was in serious jeopardy.
“Between 1999 and 2002, the company had gone through a terrible situation with the [financial] restatement and all the other issues,” Thompson remembered. “So the company was coming out of those very difficult years and trying to reposition itself, and there were lots of challenges across the board.”
In retrospect, Thompson’s entry into Rite Aid — after a 20-year career with Revco and a seven-year stint in leadership positions with two venture capital-backed firms in the fields of dentistry services and health and safety services — couldn’t have come at a better time. Under the steady guidance of new leaders Bob Miller, Mary Sammons and John Standley, the company was working to shed its past legal troubles and regain its financial footing and growth momentum. And Thompson, who had witnessed both the downside of Chapter 11 bankruptcy and the upside of recovery as a member of Revco’s management team in the 1990s, brought both his broad perspective and his vision for a higher level of pharmacy practice when he joined the beleaguered drug chain.
“The great thing about Rite Aid is its people,” he asserted. “They are very hard-working and very resilient, and they’d gone through a very tough time. So it was good to come to Rite Aid in 2004, because people were very optimistic and very encouraged that they’d been able to put all this bad stuff behind them and start rebuilding the company’s reputation and its business.
“Everyone knew we had a lot of work ahead to get the stores right, to have the right kind of stores with the right kind of services and offerings, to continue to see our company grow and be a significant player in the industry,” Thompson added.
Building a new pharmacy model
On entering Rite Aid, Thompson was immediately tasked with creating and executing a new vision for the embattled company’s pharmacy and health strategy. “I came in as VP of pharmacy business development,” he explained. “My role was to help find new opportunities that would be applicable to our strategy as a chain pharmacy.”
“There was a lot going on in the marketplace, where chain drug retailers were trying to figure out new models and new opportunities, so I was given a broad charter and was encouraged to bring in and help develop new ideas for the company. We were trying to build a model for the future,” he said.
To that end, Thompson led a push by Rite Aid into the retail clinic business early on in his tenure. “One of the first things I worked on was nurse practitioner clinics,” he explained. “We opened the first Take Care clinics in our Portland, Ore., stores.”
That first venture into clinics was short-lived; the Take Care clinics and brand were quickly acquired by Walgreens. But the experiment helped Rite Aid pioneer the concept with other health systems and providers, and the company worked to develop this key health service under Thompson.
Thompson retained the title of VP of pharmacy business development through June of 2007. When Rite Aid purchased the former Brooks-Eckerd drug store chains, consisting of more than 1,800 stores, he was tapped to lead the integration of the two companies until February 2008, after which he became SVP of the Northeast division.
When John Standley, who had left the company to serve as the CEO of Path-mark Stores in 2005, returned as the company’s new chairman and CEO in 2008, he brought in a new management slate that included Ken Martindale, who currently serves as CEO of Rite Aid Stores and president of Rite Aid Corp., and Frank Vitrano who was recently named chief strategic business development officer. Standley also recognized the value Thompson would bring to the enterprise going forward, and knew Thompson’s expertise in pharmacy and health care — and the continuity and vision he could provide as the company transitioned into a new and expanded healthcare mission — was key to that transition.
To that end, Thompson was quickly shifted from field management and put in overall charge of Rite Aid’s pharmacy operations.
“A true health-and-wellness destination”
“If you go back to the situation we were in 2008, coming into 2009 we were struggling with our pharmacy business,” Thompson recalled. “We knew the marketplace was about to change because of the Affordable Care Act. We weren’t certain at that time exactly how the ACA was going to impact retail pharmacy, but we knew it would have an impact because anything that happens in health care today seems to impact pharmacy.”
“So as a team — including John, Ken and others — we began to educate ourselves on the pending changes in the healthcare marketplace to make sure we understood it so we could respond appropriately to continue to meet the needs of our customers,” Thompson continued. “And at the same time, we had the pharmacy industry and pharmacy academia telling us about the expanding role of the pharmacist and the role of the future.”
In the midst of these changes, Walmart unveiled its hugely influential $4 generic drug discount program in fall 2006. “That kind of changed the game for everyone in trying to understand how we were going to compete in this marketplace,” Thompson said.
In the wake of that huge market disruption, he told Drug Store News, “we were also evaluating what we really want this company to be longer term. Are we going