In today's episode, we're joined by the founder of Pharmacy Podcast Show, Todd Eury. Todd has spent the last five years providing the pharmacy industry with firsthand knowledge from professionals he considers subject-matter experts.
Healthcare IS has been fortunate enough to appear on his show to discuss consulting in pharmacy informatics, and today he shares with us the inside story of the Pharmacy Podcast Show — how it evolved and where it’s heading.
"The Pharmacy Podcast Show is dedicated to the profession of the pharmacy industry. The podcast is currently audio information, interviews with industry subject-matter experts, and innovative ideas about the businesses of pharmacy.
We dedicated our programming to Independent Retail, Long-Term Care, Specialty, Small Chain [pharmacy businesses] . . . with dedicated content for each of these specific pharmacy business models. The Pharmacy Podcast Show is about dynamic people in the pharmacy industry making a difference for our profession." — Todd Eury
Listen to the episode here: Healthcare IS Podcast
Welcome to the interview portion of our podcast today. Today’s guest I’m really excited to have. A unique aspect we’re taking in out podcast today is to provide our listeners with more information in areas that are related to pharmacy and technology as a whole. We have someone today that has a very strong presence in the social media space and pharmacy as well as how that relates to pharmacy technology. Very excited to have Todd Eury with us today who’s the founder of Pharmacy Podcast which can be found at www.pharmacypodcast.com and he’s also the developer of the Pharmacy GPO. Todd, welcome and thanks for being with us today.
Todd Eury: Hey David! Thank you so much.
David Kushan: Todd can you just start off today and tell us a little bit about how the Pharmacy Podcast developed? What were some of your ideas and inspirations for that and how it’s evolved over time?
Todd Eury: Sure. It certainly wasn’t from brilliance or anything like that it was actually accidental and I was trying to come up with a way to not have to repeat some of the things that I was saying that had to do with some of the partnerships that I was creating at the time and that was in the space of pharmacy technology. Consulting with privately owned organizations whether it was at the institutional focused community or better yet the combo shop pharmacy owner. I was talking about integration with systems. Integration in creating interfaces or APIs between one software system to another. From that I started doing some recordings with some of our subject matter experts with other companies. That blew up into what started as the PTR Pharmacy Podcast which stood for Pharmacy technology Resource but we dropped that. So when the show matured in its second generation it became The Pharmacy Podcast and now we’ve reached our third generation where were bringing in a lot of other very wide areas of topics to talk about in the pharmacy business in the areas of expertise and your company Healthcare IS is actually our subject matter expert in the world of consulting and staffing and things like that. So you’re a go-to in the space we have others who are go-to subject matter experts and it’s become such a wider diversified show and were really excited about the growth.
David Kushan: Well thanks for mentioning us there Todd I really appreciate that. I know it’s grown tremendously where it caught my attention, and I’ll kind of expand on something that you said is I’ve been really impressed with the broadness of information that’s available there. The different sections as it relates to pharmacy as a whole whether that’s community pharmacy, LTC, things regarding politics and advocacy, specialty pharmacy technology all these areas for someone such as myself just to stay on top of everything else as whole of course we can focus on the technology area and bringing it all back into what we do day-to-day.
How did that kind of evolve over time? I know that you talked about PTR and there being so much more but the information is quite overwhelming if somebody were to come to your site how could you guide them in terms of the best way to start and begin to gather information?
Todd Eury: That’s a great question. So first of all, we have the search section at www.PharmacyPodcast.com, where you could probably put in a myriad of different keywords that your searching for a subject and since there’s over a 116 episodes, it could catch almost anything whether you say the word whole fill or say marketing or staffing or something like that. The sections are broken into very specific subtopics or subjects and like you said community, patient, politics and advocacy, and then we pick our subject matter experts. What was happening David was, I was realizing as much as I wanted to provide wide diversified information to pharmacy business owners, pharmacy business decision makers, executive level people, I was realizing that I was quickly losing the level of or depth of credibility in certain sections. I have to realize that to make the podcast grow like I really want it too and the vision that I have I need to bring in people that are very knowledgeable in different sections of the business. For example, yourself I didn’t know the depth of the work of consulting that you did so I was excited to have you on the show. I don’t know enough about the specialty pharmacy market, which is exploding right now. So we brought diplomat specialty pharmacy on the show. I don’t know enough about politics in pharmacy so we brought Ron Lanton as our subject matter expert on the show. And different subject matter experts become returning guests much so on the show so that they can do it two fold. Number one, provide the information to the pharmacy podcast, which is obviously the first thing that we like. Number two, create a nice little additional social media reach niche for themselves and their own business as a subject matter expert to use in their own environment. Whether that be their website or twitter or Facebook or regardless. So it’s a nice way that we provide the medium they provide the content of a subject matter expertise and it’s a win win.
David Kushan: I can certainly see how it has evolved having such a wide range of information and maybe having it streamlined into one main channel would seem to be a little difficult for somebody coming to site to specifically find what they are looking for so I can completely see how the evolution of the site has gone the way it has where you’ve got these specialty areas, from what you’ve seen, and from the people you talk to, is there one are that is standing out as having more trends right now or more intense issues to deal with than others?
Todd Eury: Yes. There are two David that are kind of standing out. Number one it’s the world of PBM and the subject matter expertise we attract to the show whether that be a RX preferred benefits which is transparent PBM or a pharmacist united for truth and transparency which is an advisory group to bring transparency to the PBM market. That’s a super hot topic. Because there’s a lot of churn and announcement and articles coming out of even the mainstream media at this point, about what’s going to become the reform of pharmacy benefit management. The second most popular section right now is the specialty section. Specialty pharmacy is truly transforming pharmacy over all it’s bringing a lot of attention and credibility to the world of pharmacy and pharmacists and the importance of pharmacists within the healthcare cycle and patient continuum and I’m excited about that because it’s going to help us obtain a national federal level of credibility for pharmacists being recognized as true healthcare providers which we all know that we are and they are and when I say we are its not me cause I’m not a pharmacist but I am so in the channel of supporting pharmacists and pharmacies that sometimes I feel like I’m part of the gang. I think that those two, specialty and the world of politics under the PBM space is probably the two most sensitive most popular topics right now.
David Kushan: Well absolutely I’m having conversations I think weekly around the specialty pharmacy space and the different entities that have never thought about that area being something that they need to be taking a look at. So that’s just confirming a lot of things that you and I are hearing in the industry on a day-to-day basis. How do you see the site evolving? You talked a little bit about what the next generation is. How is the podcast working? Is this an avenue that you see remaining for quite some time? Are there different ways to expand on that? Are listeners of the show asking for different information? I’m just curious as someone who has been in front of utilizing technology and different avenues to share information. What do you see happening next? Whether next is six months down the road or maybe it might take another year or two to change, but what do you see happening out there?
Todd Eury: The plan that I have and the road map for Pharmacy Podcast is to continue to be an enhancement to topics that are already getting coverage. So if Drug Topics or Pharmacy Times or Computer Talk or many of the very popular magazines that are out there for the business of pharmacy that are being read. If we could be a supplement to one of those topics and start building some partnerships with some of those to become integration pieces that can enhance a subject which would bring a lot more rich content to those platforms. I’ll give you an example, there’s a lot of e-zines out there, like versions of a magazine, if you flip those pages with your mouse, imagine going to a place that had a ad in it that was a Healthcare IS ad and you see David’s face, you see your website, you see your logo, imagine pressing the play button right on that paper, that e-paper and hearing the voice of David Kushan and actually telling the story. Now it’s a much deeper content that they have using the Pharmacy Podcast platform to really grow. So that’s one piece of our road map is to become deeper integrated into a lot of publications that are mammoth big publications and become an enhancement. Now I never really intended The Pharmacy Podcast to just be a stand-alone entity or medium because it’s so easily integrated into other social media platforms. Obviously twitter, obviously LinkedIn and Facebook but there’s some of these other publications we’d love to have integration with and are having talks with so things are at work to come. The second half is to really bring the world of and mystery of our pharmaceutical industry into the fold where we can start reaching out to manufacturers and research labs and having them sponsor shows to demystify the world of pharmaceuticals even at the patient level. Taking the road of being able to give information very short snippets of information whether that be 10 minutes or 15 minutes long about a disease state and talk about it on a level that a patient truly can understand me interviewing a pharmacist who is maybe passionate about a specific disease state and using those recordings to embed in pharmacy owners environments so now their listener or patients can come and listen to a little simple podcast interview with a friendly sounding knowledgeable pharmacist to expand on that topic and go a little deeper and use the podcast to reach out into the fold of communicating with the patient as well as obviously the pharmacist, pharmacy owner and decision maker.
David Kushan: You that’s just fascinating everything you just described there. It got me thinking as you were speaking, how often when I’m sitting at my desk and reading a news source, how often video is embedded into whatever article that I happen to be reading. Of course if I’m reading I can read the page or view the video but I’m also personally, very often listening to audio books whether that maybe on a drive or going for a walk or a run. I’ve thought quite a bit about when things can become a little more categorized, from a newsstand point. Right now audio from news you kind of get it as it comes without much selection. When you talk about a e-zine with an audio I think about how things might evolve into some sort of an audio magazine with options in there, does that make sense? Where it’s still from an audio standpoint. Is that in development somehow or is that something that hasn’t completely come to fruition at all based on from a visual magazine?
Todd Eury: I think depending on the road map it’s self and how far down the line we get, I’m very open to forming a board of advisors that could really help us guide. Because I don’t come from a publication background, you know, my background is more about marketing and about taking a complex message and making it palatable and understandable to the user level and that’s in a myriad of different ways. That could be from the pharmacist and the pharmacy owner not understanding necessarily technology but they understand the problem and making sense of that and then of course the world of making sense between the pharmacist and the patient and a lot of the times giving the message in an easy way to absorb information is not there and the podcast does bring a lot of knowledge and easy to consume knowledge to a level that reading doesn’t sometimes. People have asked me about video we technically do video but our listener base, a majority of them are listening between 6:30 and 9:30 in the morning, which tells us that’s a commute so we don’t want to encourage them to look at their iPhone or their droid to watch a video. They should just be listening. So were going to stick with I think the audio. Maybe someday we’ll get into video but I think there is a special place for the expansion of podcasts in this market place.
David Kushan: Absolutely, well again you’ve been listening to Todd Eury founder of the Pharmacy Podcast, which can be found online at pharmacypodcast.com. Todd you’ve shared a lot of information again I’ve go to the site very regularly. It’s a great resource for many, many different levels of pharmacy information. Just want to thank you again for being with us today.
Todd Eury: Thank you David. Appreciate it.
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