Kerr eyes pharmacy's frontier with its first patient care center

Drug Store News, Feb 15, 1999 by James Frederick

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. -- Today's Kerr Drug is a new company, in business less than two years since a group of former Thrift Drug and Eckerd Corp. executives bought a Carolina cluster of former Rite Aid and Kerr stores and revived the chain that pharmacist Banks Kerr established in 1951. Its new owners know the 153-store startup can't match the sheer marketing power and geographic reach of megachains, such as Walgreens, Rite Aid, CVS and Eckerd. But, on the experimental frontiers of pharmacy practice, where caring for patients goes well beyond basic prescription dispensing and counseling, Kerr is already becoming one of retail pharmacy's leading-edge innovators.

Kerr recently joined a growing group of pharmacy operators by opening its first full-fledged patient care facility staffed by pharmacists. Called the Kerr Drug Enhanced Pharmaceutical Care Center, the facility is housed in a Kerr drug store at University Mall not far from Kerr's Durham, N.C., headquarters. Opened last fall, it is quickly catching on with patients, thanks to fruitful collaboration efforts with local pharmacy educators and other groups and to Kerr's savvy marketing of widely embraced healthcare services, such as cholesterol screenings and flu shots.

"We're extremely pleased with consumer response there," said Kerr president and chief executive Anthony Civello. A Thrift Drug veteran, Civello led the revival of Kerr Drug as a new company in 1997.

The location for Kerr's first patient care center is no accident. Chapel Hill, which anchors one corner of North Carolina's famed Research Triangle, is home to the University of North Carolina, whose school of pharmacy is an integral part of the project and the inspiration for many of the ideas behind the center, according to Kerr officials.

"This is a collaborative effort with UNC and [School of Pharmacy] Dean Bill Campbell," Civello explained. He added that the Chapel Hill center is "the first of several that we're planning" as the chain retools its stores for a stronger focus on patient care and wellness.

"Our direction quite clearly is going to be more the healthcare area," Civello told Drug Store News. "We're going to continue to provide convenience categories and a full drug store mix where appropriate to supplement the health aids. But, we're going to be much more focused on the healthcare delivery side of the business. That means we're going to focus where the growth is--on pharmacist intervention, immunization programs and so forth," Civello said.

Kerr's first care center represents a major attempt to deliver on that mandate by offering patients a full range of services by pharmacists with enhanced training from UNG's pharmacy school, aided by clinical specialists, faculty members and Pharm.D. graduate students from the school. In the words of a brochure Kerr is using to market the center to its customers, "In addition to traditional dispensing services, the EPCC will provide everything from routine health screenings to immunizations, wellness programs, disease management counseling and more." Those services are being provided in a suite of workstations, semiprivate counseling areas and a patient education classroom carved out of a JCPenney catalogue center that was a part of the former Kerr store.

"We strongly feel that there has to be significant change in the way we deliver the service of health care to the consumer," said Civello. "We're not continually going to just chase the elusive butterfly, which is front-end [sales], growing a bigger box," he added.

"The way we do business today has to change, and with the competitive environment going forward, service will be a big part of why the consumer chooses your store instead of the other store," agreed Ralph Petri, Kerr's vice president of pharmaceutical purchasing and logistics. "We're all after the same real estate; we all have the same type of box; consumers carry the same third party cards. But, we believe that we can become the drug store of the Carolinas by partnering with the university and with manufacturers to understand how patients and the healthcare system want pharmacy care delivered. And, it's not the way it's delivered today."

While acknowledging that many of the services offered in the EPCC "won't lead directly to reimbursement" by managed care organizations and corporate health plans, Petri added, "We are determined to be on the front edge of this. We want to raise the level of care in every pharmacy, for every patient." And, despite the fact that the reimbursement for disease management by pharmacists often remains an elusive goal, "There is a great deal of interest on the payer side," Petri said.

"They believe one of their opportunities [to control healthcare costs] is to have the patients themselves take more control of their lifestyle," Petri went on. "And, these kinds of environments can help the patients through that. Nobody is quite sure how to accomplish that yet, but this is part of the changing role of pharmacy. This allows us to work together with all the right groups to hopefully be on the leading edge of where that world is taking