(light music)
Welcome to "Hadley Presents."
I'm your host, Ricky Enger, inviting you to sit back, relax,
and enjoy a conversation with the experts.
In this episode, we discuss free services
for managing your medication accessibly and independently.
And our guest is CEO of Accessible Pharmacy, Andy Burnstein.
Welcome to the show, Andy.
Hey, Ricky, thank you so much.
I really appreciate it, I'm glad to be here.
Yeah, so glad to have you.
If we had a Hadley frequently asked questions,
the question of, how do I manage my medication,
how do I figure out what's what as I'm losing my vision
or if I'm totally blind,
how do I do this in a way that works for me,
that question would be definitely in the top five.
So I know this is gonna be a really popular topic,
so so happy to have you here.
Before we talk about what accessible pharmacy is,
and all of the cool things that it can do,
why don't you just take a minute to introduce yourself
and maybe talk a little bit
about how Accessible Pharmacy started.
So, I'm in Philadelphia.
I actually live in the University City,
right on University of Pennsylvania's campus.
And our main distribution center
is in suburban Philadelphia.
I'll take a big step back,
I'll tell you about Accessible Pharmacy
and how we came into being.
The punchline is, Accessible Pharmacy Services for the Blind
is a home delivery pharmacy service specializing
in the blind and low vision community.
That's what we do.
We're the only provider of its kind,
and we're the largest blind owned healthcare company
in the country.
So our background is, this goes back a few years ago,
I was running a healthcare marketing firm
and we were developing some solutions
and some strategies to help our clients deal
with just the general issues of accessibility.
I had reached out to a friend of mine
who I met through Little League,
our kids play ball together.
I knew Alex because our kids play ball together.
He was a nice guy and he was blind, he still is blind.
So I was like, "Oh, I'll reach out to Alex,
maybe I can pick his brain a little bit.
We're gonna develop an advisory committee,
and maybe Alex can gimme some insight
into the consumer experience of a blind person."
I didn't know too much about him other than he was
a nice guy and his kids were good ball players.
We met up for a cup coffee,
and I found out that he's actually Dr. Alex Cohen.
And his story is he was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa
in his late teens.
And by the time he graduated college,
he had lost most of his eyesight.
And he ultimately went back, he reinvented himself,
he went back to school and ultimately earned a PhD
in marketing with a specific focus on retail accessibility
for the blind community.
And he wrote his doctoral dissertation
on the accessibility of the top hundred retailers in America
for the blind community.
How accessible they were on the telephone, on their website,
and at their physical locations.
So here I am thinking like,
oh, I'll hang out with Alex, we'll have a cup of coffee.
Little did I know, he's arguably one of the foremost experts
in retail accessibility in the country.
That first meeting, that's when I was like,
"Ha, We need to figure out,
we should be doing some more things around this."
And initially we started doing some consulting.
We weren't having too much success with consulting.
And at a certain point we were like,
"Huh, I have some ideas, you have some ideas.
I wonder if we could build
our own business from the ground up.
A pharmacy service that does nothing but specialize
in the blind and low vision community.
And really take steps to help people who are blind
or have low vision manage their medication,
manage their diabetes.
But more importantly, or equally as importantly,
do it in a way that's welcoming,
that reduces stress and anxiety,
and really starts to show people living more independently
and living with healthier outcomes."
So that was the origin of our business.
And then obviously from that idea,
we had to walk down the path of qualifying the idea,
building a business plan,
pulling in healthcare professionals
because we're just business people.
We don't know too much about medication.
Pulled our whole business together
and we launched just at the beginning of the pandemic,
in April, 2020.
We've been very fortunate.
We're growing nicely, we're now licensed in 31 states.
About 20% of our employees
are blind or low vision themselves.
We're bringing on patients every day
and we're learning every day, and it's been incredible.
That is awesome.
And starting a business during a pandemic
is not for the faint of heart, certainly.
And so it's great to hear that things have gone so well
and that you're continuing to grow.
So you have this business that is Accessible Pharmacy,
and the name really does say what it does,
except I'm curious about one thing.
So when we say accessibility,
that can mean different things to each of us.
So for one person,
accessibility of their medication may mean having
a braille label on a bottle,
and for somebody else that braille label
is equally as inaccessible as this tiny print.
So what do you do to kind of encompass all of those things
and make sure that each individual has their medication
in an accessible way?
You hit the nail on the head, that's exactly
what it is.
Everyone has an individual unique experience.
People come to blindness differently.
People have different degrees of vision.
There's also the types of insurance they have,
their support network,
how comfortable they are or not with technology.
All of these things play a factor in assembling a collection
of solutions for an individual that empowers them.
To oversimplify it, we essentially have three spheres.
We have accessible support, accessible packaging,
and accessible labeling.
And when we have a conversation with a new patient,
and we identify what's the best way to support this patient,
and it happens through a conversation with the patient.
What's the best way to package this medication
so they can be managed properly?
And what's the best way to label this medication
so that it can be understood in the best way?
And what's interesting is that everything we do
in those spaces, it's all free.
We make our money by charging insurance companies
and getting reimbursed by insurance companies
for medication.
All these other things, it's all about figuring out
what combination of these accessible solutions
are the best fit for the individual patient.
[Ricky[ - That's excellent.
So let's get some examples
then of what a conversation might look like
and what's available for support for packaging
and for labeling.
The easiest way for a patient to interact with us,
and we encourage this, is to pick up the phone and call.
We wanna have a face-to-face.
Not a face, a phone-to-phone conversation with someone.
And really understand what kind of medicine are you taking,
what are your challenges, how are you currently managing it?
Who else is in the home with you
that can maybe help you or support you?
What's your level of understanding of technology?
So we understand that,
what's the best way to support that patient?
When it comes to packaging,
we have a collection of different solutions.
We have presorted disposable pill organizers,
different sizes and shapes depending
on the person's medication.
And within it we can sort prescription medication,
vitamins, supplements, over the counter medication,
to really remove the burden
from the individual having to sort their meds.
That's just one example.
We also have presorted disposable pill packets.
We have different size and shape bottles
for people with mobility and dexterity issues.
So we explain to them the different options there,
and they can pick one.
And then we go into labeling.
And with labeling we have a grade one braille printer,
we also have a contracted braille printer.
We have the ability to print medication labels
with large fonts.
We can do it in both Spanish and in English.
We also work very closely with a company called ScriptTalk,
which is an incredible company.
They've been around for a while.
They actually make a sticker, it has a microchip in it,
it's called an RFID sticker.
And we can adhere that sticker to any of our packaging,
and it essentially reads all the prescription information
out loud to the individual.
By the way, we can do a combination of all these things.
We can put braille and the ScriptTalk and a QR code
and large font all in one package.
And on top of that,
the ways that we can communicate with people are,
depending on the person's need,
obviously as I mentioned the telephone,
but people can also interact with us online.
They can email us, they can text us.
We support a lot of our deaf-blind patients with texting.
And we're also the pharmacy partner of Be My Eyes.
So Be My Eyes is a great solution for blind users
to connect with sighted volunteers.
But there's also a section on there for,
it's called Specialized Help.
And anyone, whether you're a patient of ours or not,
if anyone has a question about identifying a pill,
or understanding a label,
or understanding a drug interaction,
you can engage with us through Be My Eyes
and we can support the patient.
We also use Be My Eyes to help people
for small medical devices.
So if someone buys a a talking thermometer from us,
for example, we can send them the thermometer,
and then using Be My Eyes, we can train them how to use it.
That's excellent.
Or like a blood pressure cuff, or anything like that,
"How do these things work?"
Exactly.
Yeah, Be My Eyes is amazing.
And having that specialized help,
we're, Hadley is a partner as well.
And so we love those guys,
and it's good to hear that you all are partnered
with them too.
What really strikes me as you're talking
about this is that it's been so well thought through,
in that everybody has different needs
and you've done what you can to meet those needs.
And it really is a very customer-centric kind of thing,
where you're sitting down and talking with people
instead of saying, "Here's your options, you figure it out,
just tell us what you want."
There is actually that conversation,
and I think that's so important.
So for the people that are listening and saying,
"This is what I've needed in my life for a while,
what do I do, how do I get started?"
Basically where can you operate?
And kind of what's going on there?
Are there concerns that patients need to have
about the type of insurance they have, that sort of thing.
What can you tell us about getting involved
and getting started?
Well first of all,
you touched on something that's really important,
which is we're still learning.
We learn every day from our patients,
from groups that we partner with,
from our employees about ways to be more accessible,
and about how to accommodate people's needs and challenges.
And our hope is, in 2022,
we're even gonna have more options and more solutions.
I'll give you an example.
We just started a first college internship program
on Monday.
We have a student who we met through
Vision Services for the Blind and Visually Impaired
out of New York City.
And what's interesting is that his experience,
he has a condition called North Carolina Macular Dystrophy.
As a 20-year-old who embraces technology,
the way that he identifies and interacts with technology
or interacts with packaging and stuff
is completely different
than anything that I had never experienced before.
It's awesome, we're learning every day.
So that's one thing.
The second thing is, we do accept all insurance.
There's some situations that it's not perfect,
but what we do is part of our conversation
when we start to speak with a patient for the first time,
we have a 10 minute conversation.
And the conversation is, we ask about their medication,
we ask about their challenges,
how they're currently managing it.
We get an idea about, as I mentioned,
their level of technology comfort.
We get the contact information
for their entire medical staff.
So for example, we'll reach out to their endocrinologist,
we'll reach out to their cardiologist,
their general practitioner.
We'll introduce ourselves,
we'll try to get some in-depth understanding
about that patient's experience
from the doctor's perspective.
And then we have,
one of the pharmacists from our team reviews everything.
We contact the insurance company.
And then assuming everything is good to go,
we then call the patient back.
And this usually takes a day or two.
And then we say, "Alright, this is what we've learned."
And we can make some recommendations.
Quite often we're able to say,
"You know what, I don't know if you realize this or not,
but those two meds that you're taking,
the one that your cardiologist is prescribing
and the one that your general practitioner is prescribing,
they're both safe to take together,
but there's a good likelihood you're gonna feel
really nauseous when you take them."
And the person's like, "Oh my gosh, I didn't even realize.
I've been so nauseous for the last six months.
I didn't even think about that."
And we can make some recommendations about switching things,
and pull the doctors in to make sure
that they're comfortable with it as well.
And then assuming that the patient's like,
"All right, I think I wanna try this out
for a few months to see if it's a good fit."
We reach out to their existing pharmacy,
we transfer the medical files over, and we start.
Just to clarify, this is home delivery
rather than.
And that actually takes a big burden
sometimes off the patient,
because sometimes you have to go pick up the prescription
and transportation is an issue.
So this is by mail, is that right?
Correct, and there's no charge for the
delivery as well.
That's so good.
We all take various medications or vitamin supplements,
and it can be such a hassle to figure out,
"How am I gonna get there to get this?
And oh no, I am running out and what do I do?"
So having a lot of this just managed in such a way
that the discussion is happening between the doctor,
the patient, and the pharmacist, really very, very cool.
I know that you are licensed in some states
and not licensed in others, and that's on your website.
What can you say about if somebody is in a state
where you're not, and perhaps I shouldn't say licensed,
I suppose it's more of a partnership kind of thing.
But if you're not available in their state yet,
is there anything that a patient can do
to be a part of that process or to speed things up?
Or what would you recommend?
We're currently licensed in 31 states,
including Puerto Rico and Washington DC.
And it's a process,
there's an application that we have to submit,
an application fee that we have to submit.
We've applied for licenses in every state.
We're very fortunate we haven't been rejected by any states.
Unfortunately because of the pandemic,
some of the states that are create the approval process
for us to deliver controlled substances into the state,
they haven't opened yet some of the offices.
In other states, they're remotely working.
We're pretty confident that by the end of the year
we will have, we'll be able to deliver products nationally.
We can ship right now vitamins, and supplements,
and over the counter meds, and small medical devices.
But when it comes to things like insulin
or prescription medication,
until we have the approval from the state,
we're just unfortunately not able to.
As things start opening up again,
we should see things speed up a bit.
I know that we've had people who have really struggled
with their pharmacies getting accessible labeling.
And it's just not happening
because sometimes their pharmacy doesn't know,
"What is this ScriptTalk thing even,
or what do you mean you want me to mark this syringe
in such a way?
We don't understand how to do that."
So sometimes just talking to someone who already gets it,
who gets that there are accessibility challenges
to work through and who may already know the answers
to some of the questions, that can be so helpful.
One last thing I wanted to ask about was,
we've talked a couple of times about small medical devices.
What kinds of things do you offer?
Would these be thermometers, or things in addition to that,
like pulse oximeters, anything like that?
Exactly.
Things like talking thermometers, talking glucose meters.
We support
some of the continuous glucose monitoring systems.
We have talking scales.
Everything in that space.
And what we're able to do is,
in some cases if they require programming,
we can pre-program it before we ship it to the patient.
And then we also, once they get it,
they can contact us through Be My Eyes
and we train 'em on how to use it.
So I know that people are kind of chomping
at the bit,
going, "All right, contact info.
Come on, where do I find it?"
So where can people go to find out
a bit more about what you all do,
whether it's online or just picking up the phone?
The easiest way...
I'll start from the top.
We have a website
that's a very screen reader friendly website called
accessiblepharmacy.com,
and our contact information is on there.
So if anyone has a problem remembering us,
accessiblepharmacy.com is the easiest.
On top of that,
there's three other ways that someone can reach out to us.
We encourage the best way is through the telephone,
old school communication.
We need to have a conversation to understand the patient
before we work with the patient.
So our phone number is (215)-799-9900.
The next way is for those of you that have an iPhone.
If you ask Siri, if you say,
"Siri call Accessible Pharmacy."
Siri will say, "Do you mean accessible pharmacy
in Fairless Hills, Pennsylvania?"
That's us, and it'll just patch you right through.
And finally, for those of you who are Be My Eyes users,
in a specialized help section, you can find us there.
And we have someone on our end overseeing the Be My Eyes app
to support patients between the hours of 10 and four
Monday through Friday.
But if someone needs help outside of those hours,
you can just schedule an appointment
and someone will jump on.
Great, that's fantastic.
This has been so informative and so helpful.
Any last comments you wanna make before we wrap things up,
so people can rush over to their phones and call you?
We're part of this community.
As I mentioned,
we're the largest blind owned healthcare company
in the country.
We wanna continue to grow and support people,
we need patients to do that.
So if someone wants to try us out,
there's no long-term commitment.
You can try us for a few months.
If at a certain point in the future you're like,
"Eh, you know what, I prefer my pharmacy."
We'll call your doctors, we'll call the insurance company,
we'll transfer everything back.
But we invite people to be part of our community.
Email us, call us, give us suggestions, give us feedback,
and join us.
And we are gonna be hiring again in the fall.
So as we expand into different markets,
we'd love to connect with people
to speak about employment opportunities as well.
Awesome.
Thank you so much, Andy,
for joining us and for sharing all of this information.
And you're doing wonderful things,
I wish you all and your team the best of luck
as you continue to grow.
Hey, Ricky, thank you so much, this is great.
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(cheerful music)