Helping Small, Local Pharmacies Compete

Joe Tammaro, RPh, VP of Sales and Support for McKesson, discusses the availability of central fill to small, local pharmacies. This video was filmed at the McKesson ideaShare 2019 conference in Orlando.

Joe Tammaro, RPh: For years, this central fill process has been available to large chains and to very large entities. And now this year we’re providing the opportunity, through this McKesson-owned central fill, for multiple customers—smaller customers, medium chains, independents—to all feed into this 1 facility, and for us to provide that service for maybe operators that couldn’t afford it in the past or really didn’t have the capacity to handle it in the past. So it’s very important now that they can compete on the same playing field as some of these larger operators that have been around. The beauty of this is that while McKesson is doing that work on behalf of the customer, it’s got the customer’s branding, their logos, their packaging. From a formulary perspective, we’re having a formulary that is widely being able to be used by multiple pharmacies. So the look and the feel and the ownership is of the local pharmacy. And it allows them to compete with all of the new competitors in the market. So for example, if the pharmacy chooses, perhaps they can have that prescription mailed to the patient’s house instead of picking it up at the local pharmacy, or they can compete in other services as well.