Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

You can learn more about Walgreens’ initiatives at https://www.walgreens.com.

John’s podcast and blogs about the healthcare industry are available at https://www.caretalkpodcast.com.

Our host, Maureen Metcalf, posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI. Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

• Women and Leadership: Journey Toward Equity by Sherylle J. Tan & Lisa DeFrank-Cole
• Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood by J. Michael Straczynski
• Own the AI Revolution by Neil Sahota
• Time and Chance by Kim Campbell

NOTE: As an Amazon partner, we may make a small commission from books you buy through these links.

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

John Driscoll has been at the center of healthcare innovation for more than two decades, leading large companies across sectors. He is currently the President of U.S. Healthcare and EVP, Walgreens Boots Alliance. Previously, he was the CEO of CareCentrix, the industry leader in bringing healthcare to the home, following successful stints helping lead healthcare technology (Castlight), pharmacy benefit managers (Medco, SureScripts) and insurance (Oxford) companies. John’s ongoing interest in and dedication to public health and healthcare innovation led to being selected by the Obama White House for its Entrepreneurs in Residence program to advise the FDA on innovation. John also serves as the Chairman of the Waystar Corporation and is an active investor in emerging healthcare technologies.

He helped found Testing for America and serves on its Governing Council and is the Co-Chair of the United States of Care’s Entrepreneurs Council. He chairs the Truman National Security Project, and served as a captain in the U.S. Army Reserve. John is a Board Member for the Alliance for Hunger. John has published articles in national publications, including the Los Angeles Times, Time Magazine, The Guardian and Politico.

Transcript
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Speaker 1 0:00
Big problems can feel overwhelming to leaders, but no problem is too large to fix, and that includes the US healthcare system. That’s the undercurrent of this episode with guest John Driscoll of Walgreens Boots Alliance. He discusses Walgreen’s initiatives to patch the holes in health care, including rural areas, where doctors are scarce. Similarly, the Innovative Leadership Institute provides solutions for leaders too, from assessments to facilitating group development. Learn more@innovativeleadership.com

Maureen 0:42
This is Innovating Leadership, co-creating our future. I’m your host, Maureen Metcalf, founder and CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute, where we help leaders be future ready. Helping us in this mission today is John Driscoll, Executive Vice President and President of US Healthcare for Walgreens. We’ll be talking about how Walgreens is transforming itself beyond a leading pharmacy and retailer into the leading healthcare provider in local markets and nationwide. John, we’re glad that you’ve joined us. We all know Walgreens as the corner pharmacy. How is that changing under your leadership?

Speaker 2 1:19
Well, I think it’s not just my leadership, Maureen, it’s really the leadership of the whole company, but I think the right way to think about Walgreens is pharmacists and pharmacy in general, and we were fortunate to have led the build out of the corner pharmacy, and really most of the innovations in chain pharmacy over the last 100 years, honestly, is that there’s a massive opportunity to leverage the convenience, trust, connection, and engagement of patients that are coming to our stores to solve a lot of the gaps in healthcare, and as pharmacy has come under more and more reimbursement pressure, our pharmacists are paid and our company is paid less and less to do more and more, if you will, we just recognize that there are some real gaps and opportunities in healthcare, so it’s less changing what we do than building on what we’re good at, which is that trust and convenience. A lot of pharmacists actually go to pharmacy school to care for people, and what they’ve found is that they end up being sort of turned into, in some cases, efficiency machines, particularly if you think about COVID, and what we want to do is build on that intelligence and connection, support the pharmacists, and then add more services to stores, and frankly, leverage more of what we do for health plans and docs, and so, long answer to a short question, but what we’d like Walgreens to be is the partner for health systems and docs and health plans, but also the care partner, if you will, for the patients who come into our stores with more questions than answers.

Maureen 2:52
I’m just thinking of visits I’ve had everywhere from, I’ve got a rash, help me, I don’t know what I need, is it poison ivy or is it shingles, I can’t Google this thing is on my body, help me figure it out. I need someone to look at me, and I don’t necessarily want to schedule a doctor’s appointment to do that. If I can go to my local Walgreens to get help figuring it out,

Speaker 2 3:14
you’re absolutely right, Maureen. I mean, if you think about it, the healthcare system, in many ways, is the most inconvenient system for consumers of any consumer service in America, and there’s lots of reasons why that’s the case, but we actually can help solve that problem at Walgreens and other pharmacies, and we’re really focused on that. We’re actually an international company, so we’ve got Boots UK, which is the leading retailer in England, Scotland, and Wales, and in that country, the National Health Service is actually supporting us with a pharmacy first set of services where pharmacists can deal with things like basic rashes, test and treat around sore throats, UTIs, things that are conventional, common, relatively high frequency, but that are kind of at the low end of what a primary care office would prioritize for a visit, but it’s that the high end of what is a patient you want to deal with right now, and I think that’s what we’re very focused on, is how can we augment and support or fill the gaps that consumers and patients feel every day in healthcare, and I think we can make a big contribution, I think we can make a material contribution at connecting patients more regularly to the right care at the right time, and just solving problems,

Maureen 4:22
it seems so wise on the surface, and yet getting from that’s a great idea to implementation at scale has to be a significant undertaking.

Speaker 2 4:33
Oh, it is. We’ve got 9000 stores and 200,000 pharmacists, which sounds like a lot, but we’ve been running more and more work through those pharmacies, and honestly, we’re working, and we’re behind where we need to be to support those pharmacists and pharm techs, and to take them out of the mechanical tasks of just trying to keep up with the scripts and the immunizations, and we put 7 million shots in arms, and well, that’s exactly the number, but we were north of 5 million shots. As of a few weeks ago, we were probably closing on six or seven at this point, and that’s on top of running the stores, providing the prescriptions, making sure that my 90 year old mother gets the right script, not the wrong script, and it’s tweaked in the right way for her relatively fragile state, and so what we’re trying to do is sort of a three part strategy, we are making sure that we can get paid for services that we do in the store, so that we have some more money to actually invest in the stores. We are investing ahead in automation to take some of the busy work out of pharmacists and pharm techs, and frankly, have it pre-packaged, so that they have to do less of pill counting and pill packaging. And the third thing is really exploring what patients need. It could be we’ve got 500 stores where we do lab samples with lab cores. That’s something that’s helpful. We’re looking at international examples of in Canada, Shoppers Drug Mart, which is the leading pharmacy there, is actually getting directly into primary care, and we’re testing out a primary care model connected to our stores with Village MD, so it’s supporting building on making their pharmacist job easier. It’s making sure that they can have more of a connection to the patients, and it’s investing in and building out models, which will vary in size and scale and in service level, so that we can test and then grow what communities and patients need to solve healthcare problems, because the problems of healthcare costing too much, being inconvenient, and in many cases not performing, is not going away. We’ve got a structured healthcare system that’s there, but your pharmacist is going to see your patient, a typical patient, five to 12 times as frequently as they’ll see their internal medicine doc. We should be able to turn those into moments of truth and moments of help for patients and caregivers that I think we can help solve for one of the biggest challenges of our health care system, which is it’s disconnected. I think of my sister had cystic fibrosis, that’s a really complicated disease to the lot of chronic diseases for kids that you’re not just dealing with the primary diagnosis, you’re dealing with how do you keep my kid in school? How do you avoid a cold or vulnerable adults? My 90 year old mother making sure she gets the right shots, not the wrong shots. All of this is complicated, and we can help solve for that complexity, because we’re connected and connecting to patients, and that’s without overdoing it. We’re going to try to find the places where we can really help, and then we’re going to scale those.

Maureen 7:21
I love the idea of concurrently using technology to do things like count and package pills, because I can’t imagine anyone went to pharmacy school for that many years, so they can dispense pills,

Speaker 2 7:33
count in fives. Yeah,

Maureen 7:35
and again, I assume, and you’ve said people go to pharmacy school, because they want to touch patients, not pills, and this is the avenue to do that. So, using technology to leverage what it does well and create the space for the pharmacist, especially as I think about the disaggregation of healthcare experts, if I have a heart doc and a diabetes doc and an internal medicine doc, they may not be interacting with one another, and so my pharmacist may be the one who’s helping me knit things together that I’m not trained in, and I could not understand.

Speaker 2 8:14
Think about it in the context, your point about the gaps in connection, follow through, and collaboration are absolutely right. We have a healthcare system that is a team sport, but undermined by individual incentives and structures. And as a pharmacist, and even with other services, we’re not going to be able to solve every problem. But gosh, if we could just help you coordinate your scripts, because the average adult over 70 is going to have two or three chronic conditions, and is going to be on some scripts. If you’re chronically ill, and you’re particularly sick, you could be on five or six different meds. And to just play that role of care traffic control around prescriptions, in some cases deprescribing, because there’s not a lot of visibility for doctors on what prescription drugs you’re taking. In some cases, tweaking it is really a critical role, and then we’re also very focused on then connecting patients to the care they need when they need it, and providing services, but the other is just making sure that our pharmacists are connecting and collaborating more efficiently, and leveraging technology with doctors, because doctors see the benefit of that too. It’s again knitting together the disconnected part of our healthcare system, we’re not going to do everything, but being able to do that a little bit to help my mother just a bit more, to help my cousin, who’s got a child with cystic fibrosis, like my sister, make their jobs a little easier. It’s a massive lift in their lives, but it’ll also improve healthcare outcomes, lower costs, and delay families. It just takes the hassle and the fear away. If you know that, at least from a pharmacy perspective, to quote Ella Fitzgerald, someone’s watching over you. I mean, that’s the role we want to play.

Maureen 9:49
Having just lost my mother, and I want to amplify the point you’re making.

Speaker 2 9:54
I’m sorry.

Maureen 9:55
Thank you. She had dementia. It was the end of a long journey. So appropriately she has passed, but the someone is watching over you. The need for people to advocate is so crucial, because family members are doing the best they can. I was certainly doing the best I could, but I needed help. Frankly, I was the only one in charge of her final wishes of DNR, and which treatment she didn’t get, and as that gatekeeper, I needed to collaborate with the pharmacist who made sure she got the morphine she needed, and the pain meds, and the

Speaker 2 10:33
hard stuff.

Maureen 10:34
Yeah, and having a pharmacist who helped us through that process changed her final journey, so just acknowledging that when we need it most, having the integrated system where the pharmacist has time and energy to talk to me.

Speaker 2 10:51
The thing about the independent pharmacies, the chain pharmacies, as opposed to pharmacies that are embedded in other parts of the sector, a lot of access to pharmacy is those pharmacy companies, those pharmacy entrepreneurs, they’re very focused on pharmacy, and I will say that I’ve been happily having worked in other parts of the healthcare sector, encouraged by the heart-centered kindness of a lot of these overworked, overscheduled pharmacists, because just like doctors and hospitals are really still dealing with the long tail of a little bit of burnout and overwork from Covid. Don’t forget that all of our pharmacies were open as much as we could staff them every day during Covid, and that’s a big burden for folks not to get a break, and we still have a challenge because of reimbursement, because of the way PBMs and health plans pay. We’re being paid less and less to do more. I’m just super proud of the Walgreens pharmacists who do inject a little bit of kindness and humanity into a lot of their interactions, most of the interactions with patients, because well, we’re lucky that that’s how they came to the profession, but even luckier and more fortunate that they have persevered through this, and then see that as their mission, and we’re actively trying to give them more tools, because when they can solve a problem like with your mother or mine, that’s great day, that’s when the job is fun.

Maureen 12:09
How do you build a culture of kindness and authenticity in an environment of burnout? They were front lines of giving COVID shots, so they literally touched everyone in the communities,

Speaker 2 12:22
and on texts, and in some cases the people at the front of the store who were just directing people to the pharmacist. Sometimes we kind of fetishize the great patent-like steely eye macho leader, and gosh, maybe sometimes in battle you need that, but even in the time of patent, you had a lot of the generals who had a lot of followership who were gentle, heart-centered, connected leaders like Omar Bradley and Eisenhower, and I guess the way I think about our very multicultural workforce, which reflects the diversity of the country in many cases, these entry-level jobs where people get into pharmacy not with a background in management, with a desire to care. I think it’s really critical that senior leaders, and I’m lucky to have leaders like Tim Wentworth, our CEO, and Tracy, our head of retail, Rick, our head of pharmacy, who really do celebrate and create room for authenticity and for kindness, and I think it’s modeling that activity every day that allows you to get to a position of a culture that’s self-reinforcing around kindness and connection. You don’t lead, people aren’t going to feel permitted to share that part of them. If you do, it’s amazing what can come out and what you’ll see,

Maureen 13:41
I had the privilege of listening to a recently retired commandant of the Marine Corps. This was during COVID, talking about the number one skill for deployed military folks, and what I did not expect from the Marine Corps was a conversation about compassion, helping folks navigate the challenges while they’re deployed care helping people know that their families are cared for while they’re deployed.

Speaker 2 14:08
I spend a little bit of time as a platoon leader in just to the reserves, I was ever downrange. The most important thing, most important quality in leadership in the military is whether your troops believe you have they and their families back, whether they’re more important than you. If you’ve got that, they will lead, and they will fight, and they will literally go into combat, put their lives at risk. And if they don’t, the middle falls out. It’s that compassionate connection, however expressed, and the authenticity there, because it’s not something you can write down and memorize, and then rehearse. It really has to be real, and it can come in every form. I mean, I’ve met great leaders who were young Dominican female immigrants as platoon leaders, and I met folks from West Point who look like Dash Rip Rock, or literally graduates from Top Gun, who look kind of like a larger version of the heroes in those movies, and so you can express it in any form, but one thing you cannot lack. It is heart and connection to your troops, and I think that compassion – it may be a surprising word, but it’s an essential quality, even if you don’t acknowledge it, because the other thing is that you can be a great leader and be compassionate and not necessarily articulate it, but people can feel it. People have an almost animal sense of whether it’s real or not.

Maureen 15:19
That’s a really important point, because there are people who say all the right words, and you wouldn’t trust them to walk your dog.

Speaker 2 15:26
No, I like my dogs. Yes, and that’s my point.

Maureen 15:29
And then there are other people who don’t have words for it, or they don’t feel the need to say them, but it just shows up in every interaction, every single interaction.

Speaker 2 15:40
You know, Maureen, I think it’s how you ground yourself. I had this experience when I was training to be a platoon leader, where I Fort Bragg, now Fort Liberty, I think I marched my troops into the side of a barracks twice. I never had my shoes shined correctly, and I certainly was not great at assembling and disassembling my M 16, but at one point I won in a leadership award, and the sergeant who, because you get it from your non-commissioned officers, is it? Honestly, sir, there’s a lot better people at you had military skills. I mean, let’s be honest, you almost lost yourself during land navigation, but that actually isn’t what’s essential for combat. When other people dug trenches, you dug trenches, and when people fell behind, you grabbed their back. You instinctively get it. It wasn’t something anyone told you to do. I would go into combat with you, because I’d know that you take care of your troops, and that makes my job easier, and you, someone I want to fight with. I was shocked at that. He said, ‘Look, the we can’t teach that kind of connection and that kind of servant leadership. He’d served in multiple tours in Vietnam, is as a while ago, and he said, ‘We can’t teach it, but we can see it.

Maureen 16:41
How does that experience of leadership early in life?

Speaker 2 16:45
Yes, I was a child,

Maureen 16:47
probably 22 right?

Speaker 2 16:50
Yeah, 22

Maureen 16:51
How has that led you and informed your career and how you lead now, especially the distinction between leaders’ plan change. They implemented fairly structured changes during COVID. People who were able to plan and control didn’t thrive. It was unplanned, it was uncontrolled, it was unforeseeable. And my assumption is you’re in this role leading innovation at a point in time that you’re able to balance both I can plan and control, and I can navigate the unplanned and uncontrolled.

Speaker 2 17:28
I’ve been fortunate or unfortunate to have a lot of surprises in my life and my business career, and so I guess I never really believed in the homeostasis. Hey, you have the plan, you figure 5% to 10% up, you manage expectations. That’s not been my experience at an office at Two World Trade, I was in an internet business at Priceline going into the crash of oh one, I’ve been through some traumatic things in companies, and so as a country we were completely surprised and traumatized to 911 and from a business perspective people were pretty beaten up by different market crashes, and I guess at a relatively early age I believe that we had to be prepared, or we could manage through the unprepared shock, and the way you do it is how you prepare your organization. Resilience and flexibility come from connection and clarity, and let me explain what I mean by that. One of the most important things you can do as a leader is communicate clearly and be transparent about what’s really going on. If you can do that, and people feel connected to you, and that you bring them along on your journey, then I think it’s a natural comfort in coalescing around the new plan, because in each of those circumstances, in the case of 911 we had an office of two world trade. I was not there that day. I was delayed for, I forget what reason, but Empire, the New York Blues plan, now part of Anthem or Elevance, had a complete backup plan, and everyone leaned into that plan because they knew we had millions of people who were relying on us to make sure they got coverage and care. In the crash of a one, it was quite clear that the internet was coming apart, but I spent a lot of time with the team members making sure they understood that their contributions were real, that regardless of what happened to the business, it was more about the business and the market and about them. My ability to actually navigate through that with them had a lot more to do with everything that Devin did beforehand, in terms of, yes, they saw that was a plan, they understood it was transparent, and then when we’d crashed, you know, they’re like, okay, well, what’s the, what are we going to do now, because we’re a team, I think that’s how you get through those moments of trauma, and I don’t mean to compare the physical and psychological trauma of 911 which was quite real, and is still very real for a lot of folks who were closer to it than I was, but if you’re in a business that the market goes away, a lot of your friends are losing jobs, that same kind of strong shock or pivot, you can’t start to say, well, now we’re going to be resilient if that’s not what you build the muscle.

Maureen 19:52
Agreed, the whole term anti-fragile comes to mind. How do you build the capacity that shocks help you strengthen. So, how do you personally build resilience?

Speaker 2 20:04
There’s two components. One of the things I learned was at Oxford Health Plans in the 90s, and our claim system fell apart, which is an insurance company. When you can’t pay claims, that’s kind of traumatic. 20-four out of 20-nine officers are asked to leave. I’m asked to stay. I’m running about 20 or 30% of the company in government programs, which should probably the highest amount of government oversight, and I think the first thing I realized is the only thing I could control was my schedule and my health, and so I really focused on food, sleep, you know, I’m somewhat spiritual, prayer, just having real routines, so that I was grounded, and then I spent a lot of time with my teammates again, giving them a clear sense of why this happened, that it wasn’t them being completely transparent about what we knew, what we didn’t know, how it would impact them, and staying very close to them as opposed to pulling apart, and so I think if you can take care of yourself and your team members feel like you care about them and you’re connected and you’re completely transparent, including about the things you don’t know. Think the role of the leader is not to be the all-knowing or faking all-knowing leader. It’s to this is, we know, this is we don’t know, this is my role, this is your role, this is how we’re going to get through this together. Those three things: take care of yourself first, make sure you’re authentic, clear, and complete, and being comfortable with acknowledging the unknown, and then reinforcing the connection, collaboration, and clarity. I think that’s probably the best guidance I can give, because we did have colleagues who were really burning out because they weren’t taking care of themselves, and the quickest way to lose your teammates in a time of traumatic change is don’t be transparent.

Maureen 21:40
Transparency is interesting to me, because you added several things to that. There’s stuff we don’t know, and here’s the path forward for us to figure it out, not just I’m lost, scared, and confused. I may be all of those, and we will collectively come together, because each of us has a piece of that solution, and together we will figure this out.

Speaker 2 22:04
And the only thing I’d add to that, Marina, absolutely, is that you’re never lost if you’ve got a team. That’s one of my strong views. You may be confused, and you may be scared. In fact, if you’re not scared and confused after a traumatic change, you’re probably not paying attention. But I think if there’s that sense of team, I think that really creates the spine, if you will, of that resilient moment.

Maureen 22:23
Our framework for resilience has four components: one’s the physical, one’s the managing my thinking, one is the leading with heart, which includes the spirituality, and then the fourth is connection to me. That’s where the team piece comes in, the Gallup best friend at work, and those kinds of things, who surrounds me that I can trust to have my back and my front to help me think through what’s the next step.

Speaker 2 22:49
You’re triggering a lot of reflections on moments I’ve probably tried to bury, but I think the other thing I’d reflect on is pessimists don’t thrive at a time of change, and sometimes you have to help people to be optimistic, because as a leader, they’re not necessarily going to believe that they see a way out, a way around, and I happen to be sort of a bit of a paranoid optimist by nature. I’ve sort of assumed that bad things are going to happen at some point, but also I kind of believe that with the right team I can figure out everything, and that’s probably a lack of coaching and education at an early age, thinking, but or maybe it’s by personality, but I will say that wherever you are on that optimism scale, max out on it in times of change, because that creates inspiration even without clarity, and I think that would be the only other thing I’d add.

Maureen 23:42
We came up with a list of top 10 characteristics leaders need during the AI transformation, and you could replace AI with any massive transformation, and one of them is an abundance mindset, and I don’t mean the airy fairy, non-thinking abundance mindset, I mean the ability to find that positivity and figure out how to connect the dots and create solutions that don’t exist to solve the problem.

Speaker 2 24:11
I think that’s a great way of thinking about it, Maureen, because with an abundance mindset, whether you think of it as abundance, opportunity, or optimism, you’re only going to find the path that works well if you’re looking for it.

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Speaker 5 25:28
Welcome back to, uh, yeah, that’s a pepper thing. First up, we’ve got Harrison wrapping his Dr Pepper in a tiny quilt, so it feels at home. Oh, how tender, that’s a pepper thing. And over to Becca, who’s whispering affirmations to her, can

Speaker 6 25:42
you’re sweet, you’re unique, you’re the best thing I ever poured over ice.

Speaker 5 25:45
She swears it makes it taste better. It’s not a science thing, but it’s a pepper thing. Why do they all do it? All for that sweet, delicious, truly one of a kind taste of Dr Pepper. It’s a pepper thing,

Speaker 2 25:57
and abundance creates that vector view that says, okay, the center doesn’t look right, but maybe on the sides there’s more of an opportunity, and it’s our job to explore and exploit that.

Maureen 26:10
Failure just isn’t an option, so giving up isn’t going to happen.

Speaker 2 26:14
That’s absolutely right in the military context, but it’s also true in healthcare, it’s also true in pharmacy, if you feel like you’re going to fail as a leader, you’re guaranteed to get there. I mean, it’s actually not that hard to figure that out, and if you have that view, which I do, thinking back to Oxford Health Plans, when the stock crashed, went from like 70 bucks a share to about 29 in a day to eventually end up at five, which is a pretty big change for a company that was one of the fastest growing companies in America at the time. One of the things I said is, you know, we have a professional responsibility to be optimistic, because we owe it to our teams to find the opportunity. In addition to failure isn’t an option in a period of traumatic change, and it’s captured in your abundance mindset point, you have a professional responsibility to find those opportunities. Certainly, when you think about AI and pharmacy, which is a very manual, traditional supply chain, almost pin factory like level of lack of automation, which we’re trying to change at Walgreens. There’s a lot of things. We just had a conversation yesterday about how advanced technology can cut out a lot of administrivia, though you have robots doing the picking and the sorting and the packaging of some of our drugs in our automated facilities. What’s really exciting is, can you algorithmically just take people’s life out of administrative and more towards connection? Can we allow the human quality of our 200,000 pharmacists and pharm techs to shine, because we’ve taken all those tasks out. Wow, we need to actually learn more about this advanced technology, even though we’re in a low-tech industry, to take the dumb tech things out and add more human connection, and that’s what everyone in healthcare wants, is more human connection, more people looking at them and not screens, and more people listening, as opposed to just handing out explanations of benefits or drugs that you could barely understand,

Maureen 28:07
and it does seem like to amplify that, the promise is that a lot of this new technology, 10 years from now, pharmacy is going to look a lot different.

Speaker 2 28:17
It is

Maureen 28:17
there’s a PWC report that says interviews with CEOs, 4500 of them, 40% of businesses will be out of business in 10 years.

Speaker 2 28:26
One of the things about pharmacies is that we’re not going to be out of business, but the business is going to be very different. We have a lot of communities in rural areas, particularly where there’s no very little primary care coverage, and they’re struggling, and what I’m so proud of is the role that our pharmacists play in helping advise and support healthcare in remote areas, where there isn’t a lot of access to doctors, and doctors aren’t likely to move there tomorrow. In fact, in some cases, you walk in by a pharmacist, you’ll hear some of the patients referring to the pharmacist as doc, as they’re in a white coat, and they’re giving them medical advice, and our guys are very clear, like we’re not doctors, and all that, but if we could create more of those opportunities for those pharmacists and pharm techs to give better advice, to spend a little bit more time with patients, to do more testing and treating of basic sniffles and sore throats and UTIs. Gosh, that opportunity is going to be created by automating, simplifying, and taking the more slow and low tech work out of the pharmacies and automating, and I think I think that’s going to be the biggest lift from a pharmacy perspective, and from a healthcare perspective is returning care providers to connection to their patients.

Maureen 29:34
I worked with a client who was testing a 3D printed laser used for people who had had cancer treatments in their mouth, so radiation, so serious implication. There are few people in the country who now administer this process. Patients have to fly a long way in a rural pharmacy. This kind of device could be 3D printed and sent home with a pen. Patient

Speaker 2 30:00
3D printing is an entirely different, really exciting area, but we’ve got eight to 9000 points of connection within five miles of every American. You think about that as a connection and delivery system. There’s a lot more we could do with that, because again, people are already going to their pharmacy more frequently than they’re seeing their doctors,

Maureen 30:19
and how brilliant that people in rural areas will now have access to treatment that just wasn’t possible.

Speaker 2 30:27
That’s the good news. The bad news is that right now, as American healthcare system executives, we don’t do a good job of taking care of the rural care, because that’s not where the money is. So much of the best care goes to where there’s higher reimbursement, and I understand that I mean that’s the way the reimbursement system works, but that is a real challenge for rural America, where we’ve got hundreds of hospitals closing, it’s very hard to get doctors to practice there, they’re disproportionately folks who are immigrant doctors, obviously the immigration pipeline has been restricted, as we are challenged to sort out a unified immigration policy, those populations are aging, and they need more help, and we’re there as pharmacies that we can provide more care and find better ways to solve those problems, but it’s a challenge today.

Maureen 31:12
What are you most excited about in the next two to five years that’s going to come online? I’ve heard a lot of examples. Is there something that personally charges your battery when you think about

Speaker 2 31:24
it? The two things that excite me most, Maureen, are the fact that we are better at better at leveraging digital connections to simplify, automate, and connect patients and caregivers to solutions. I mean, I’ll give you one example: we’ve got an urgent care centers called City MD in the New York metro area. We’ve got the Dwayne Reed pharmacies in New York, and you’re going to be able to go into any Dwayne Reed later this year. There’s going to be a QR code, and if the pharmacist can’t answer your question and you want to quickly set up a televisit or go to an urgent care center, we’re going to be connected directly, and just to be able to, through a QR code, go to a televisit to connect to a doctor real time. You’re solving for the inconvenient truth that healthcare is pretty inconvenient. To your point about scheduling, and as we get better and better through the federal mandate to standardize information, there’s gonna be a lot more information sharing, so your information, the risks, if you will, and the opportunities to get you better are going to be better shared among the pharmacist, the hospital, the doctor, the specialist. That’s really exciting, and we’re certainly exploring that with virtual care options for consumers who come into our stores. We’ve got a partnership with a telemedicine provider, we’re connecting with doctors and helping hospital systems go into value-based care. We’re leveraging QR codes to set up tele visits. We’re playing around with our website. All of that is taking advantage of digitally knitting together a system that would otherwise be disconnected and harder to care for. The other thing I’m really excited about in the system that’s where 10,000 people become Medicare eligible every day, and Medicaid is one of the largest payers, the elderly and the poor. Is we’ve historically not done as great a job at allowing nurses, pharmacists, techs to really do more in healthcare, and I think what you’re seeing through my old company, Care Centrix, or through what we’re doing at Walgreens with nurses and docs in the stores, what we’re leveraging pharmacists and pharm techs. What we’re seeing in Boots UK is that the bottom of the pyramid in terms of specialization and compensation is no longer constrained, because they’ve got hearts, they’ve got healthcare insight, and they want to help patients. If we can leverage digital and leverage more of the participants in the healthcare system, not just the apex doctors and nurse practitioners. We’re going to have more capability, more access, and better information, and that’s what’s driving a lot of the solutions we’re providing in the stores, and testing and trying out, and that can help patients just get through their healthcare journey with a lot less hassle and a little more help.

Maureen 34:04
I love the integration across the healthcare system, whether I go to my pharmacist first or my doc first or the urgent care first one, that they’re connected. Everyone has, whether it’s MyChart or whatever system people are using that you’re part of each of those systems, and I can imagine one patient is integrated into multiple systems because they’re going to different providers.

Speaker 2 34:29
That’s exactly right. And then, when you think about artificial intelligence, which is a lousy word for more and better compute, because it’s not so much artificial and it isn’t always intelligent, is that you can use those advanced computer tools to knit together systems that didn’t otherwise talk to each other. You’re seeing today with Copilot at Microsoft, and auto complete around, or more intelligent complete around coding. Think about more sophisticated software tools that actually take what’s in MyChart, which is Epic System, and they can immediately translate it and. Pull out the information that’s from Cerner Oracle, which is on a different system, and work with Athena, which is a different system as well. And that’s all done invisibly. What’s exciting about technology is when you don’t even know it’s there, but you just have a problem solved that you either had and wasn’t solved, or you didn’t even know you had, and now you’re happier for having solved it.

Maureen 35:19
And when those systems aren’t knit together, people die.

Speaker 2 35:22
Oh, 100% We still have too many people dying of drug-drug interaction, which is absolutely preventable. We still have too many people dying of sepsis that could have been predicted from a hospital. We still have too many people who are misdiagnosed and sent to the wrong part of the healthcare system. I mean, I’ve been telling you the optimistic case, but we’ve got a healthcare system that’s three to $4 trillion 20% of the economy, the most expensive industrial country costs in the OECD, and we’re near the bottom of outcomes, and so we’ve got plenty of room to do a lot better. And when we talk about outcomes, we’re really talking about pain, suffering, and death.

Maureen 35:54
But the optimistic side is, yes, in fact, this is our current state, we can acknowledge it, and what Walgreens is doing is a really strong step to address the negative state of health care right now.

Speaker 2 36:08
Oh, 100% We also believe being an independent partner and being a friend to all and an enemy of none puts us in a position of building that team, US Healthcare, and we’re leveraging folks who otherwise haven’t been engaged, pharmacists and pharmacists. We’re connecting people digitally, and we’re trying out with our village MD docs and stores, with our connections with City MD urgent centers, with our work with LabCorp, simplifying access to lab pickup. We’re trying to leverage all of that connection. We’re supporting collaboration. We’re actually going to be in the risk business of actually taking risk to deliver better outcomes for patients with hospital systems through our new partnership with Pearl. So, no, we’re fighting the good battle to try to drive better outcomes at lower costs by leveraging building on the trust, convenience, and traffic we’ve got in pharmacy. So, we know I’m.. I just think we want to be realistic about the challenge, but frankly, that just creates more opportunity for innovators like ourselves,

Maureen 37:05
and with the right people we will create a better outcome,

Speaker 2 37:09
as long as we never lose that heart-centered connection that we started the conversation about injecting a little kindness into a little connection. It’s actually what pharmacists and pharmacies are good at, is representing their local communities and serving them, that’s also one of the superpowers of our pharmacy and our company.

Maureen 37:27
On that very positive note, thank you so much, John, for joining us and sharing what you’re doing, and thank you to our listeners for engaging and learning from each of our guests.

Speaker 2 37:39
Delighted to be here, thanks for having me.

Maureen 37:41
How would people learn about your story?

Speaker 2 37:43
You can go to walgreens.com We’ve got a very active website there. We are rolling out new stuff all the time, Maurice. Watch out, but walgreens.com is probably the best place to start.

Maureen 37:55
Thank you so much, John. It’s been just a delight

Speaker 2 37:58
for me as well. Thanks for having me. I

Speaker 3 38:15
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Speaker 4 38:45
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Speaker 5 39:17
Welcome back to Oh, yeah, that’s a Pepper Thing. First up, we’ve got Harrison wrapping his Dr Pepper in a tiny quilt, so it feels at home. Oh, how tender, that’s a pepper thing. And over to Becca, who’s whispering affirmations to her can.

Speaker 6 39:31
You’re sweet, you’re unique, you’re the best thing I ever poured over ice.

Speaker 5 39:34
She swears it makes it taste better. It’s not a science thing, but it’s a pepper thing. Why do they all do it? All for that sweet, delicious, truly one of a kind taste of Dr Pepper. It’s a pepper thing.