Rite Aid executives have started experimenting with a new strategy in their crusade to turn the company into a “modern pharmacy” and compete with Walgreens and CVS: smaller stores.

The retail pharmacy chain began a small-format store program in November 2022, with executives saying the goal is to improve access to pharmacy services in pharmacy deserts, or areas that lack convenient access to a pharmacy.

“With these new smaller-format pharmacy locations, we are bringing critical pharmacy services to underserved communities,” Andre Persaud, the then-chief retail officer at Rite Aid, said in a November 2022 statement.

Rite Aid spokesperson Catherine Carter told Healthcare Brew that the small-format store program is part of the company’s growth strategy to “expand into untapped markets and customers.” Heyward Donigan, who was Rite Aid’s CEO until the start of this year, said in a December 2022 earnings call that the stores would be a “core driver” of growth for Rite Aid.

The company has plenty of pharmacy deserts to choose from—more than 40% of all US counties are considered pharmacy deserts, meaning residents have to drive more than 15 minutes to get to a pharmacy, according to research from drug marketplace GoodRx.

Lacking access to a pharmacy makes people more likely to stop taking their medications, and that lack of adherence costs the US healthcare system a lot of money. In 2016, ineffective medication therapy, including nonadherence, cost the US about $528.4 billion, or 16% of the total US healthcare spend, a study found.

So far, Rite Aid has opened four small-format stores in rural Virginia, with the latest opening at the end of April in a town called Grottoes, which has fewer than 3,000 residents. Carter told Healthcare Brew the stores are “strategically placed in areas without nearby access” to pharmacy services.

Keep reading here.—MA

Do you work in healthcare or have information about the industry that we should know? Email Maia at [email protected]. For completely confidential conversations, ask Maia for her number on Signal.

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Not every employee at Dayton Children’s Hospital gets a proximity badge, at least at the moment. The authenticators that allow healthcare professionals to log in to their workstations with a tap, tap, taparoo are still in the process of being deployed.

Dayton Children’s, established just over a century ago, now sees more than 300,000 patients a year—many of whom are young patients with leukemia or other cancers and need a variety of treatments like chemotherapy. The western Ohio hospital has the same needs as larger health systems but not the same resources or budget, which means the smaller staff, including its chief information officer (CIO), must be thoughtful and selective about which technologies get deployed first—and patient.

“The kinds of things that we may be a little behind on are some of the ‘nice-to-haves,’” J.D. Whitlock, CIO at Dayton Children’s, the only Level 1 pediatric trauma center in the region, told Healthcare Brew.

Another “nice-to-have” deployment in the works for Whitlock and his team of about 125 IT employees: digitization of paper oncology records. For the effort, developers must sit down with clinicians and place hundreds of individual chemotherapy instructions—also known as infusion protocols—into an oncology module called Epic Beacon (from healthcare software company Epic Systems).

So why didn’t the hospital implement the system earlier?

“We’re small. We have four oncologists. And it was a pretty heavy lift,” Whitlock said.

For comparison, Dayton Children’s has roughly 4,000 employees, including about 300 or so doctors—a small number compared to big sites like NewYork-Presbyterian (which has around 27,000 staff) or Mass General Brigham (which has a total staff of approximately 74,000).

Part of a CIO’s job is to ease the workload—both by convincing business leaders to bring in valuable medical technologies and checking in on the implementation along the way. The job is especially important in smaller facilities with limited resources.

Keep reading here.—BH

Anika Gardenhire recently took on the role of chief customer experience officer at Centene Corporation, a St. Louis-based managed care company. Her background as a cardiology recovery nurse and Centene’s chief digital officer will help her act as a “caregiver” for the voices of Centene’s more than 26 million members and ensure that their perspectives are incorporated into Centene’s work, she told Healthcare Brew.

Gardenhire sat down with us to discuss health equity and the goals she’d like to accomplish as chief customer experience officer.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What does a chief customer experience officer do?

The chief customer experience officer role is really about ensuring that our members and ultimately those who support our members—so our government regulatory partners, our brokers, our providers, and also our employees—are all having their voices show up in the way that we work. That work includes getting an understanding of what our customers really want.

What are some ways that you try to understand what Centene customers want?

What I think is some of the most interesting research that we do is what I would consider more of the ethnographic research where we’re spending time with our members. We’re doing things like ride-alongs or bringing members who are in a specific geography in for focus groups and really understanding their needs and their voices from that perspective.

How does health equity play into your role?

I think health equity bleeds through the fabric of the organization. When we think about health equity, we’re thinking about everything from how do we use data to actually really identify our members so that we can understand what things might be specific and most appropriate for our population to how are we thinking about the way that we design our services?

Keep reading here.—KW

Do you work in healthcare or have information about the industry that we should know? Email Kristine at [email protected]. For completely confidential conversations, ask Kristine for her number on Signal.

Today’s top healthcare reads.

Stat: Four percent of CDC survey respondents in 2020 said they drank bleach during the early stages of the pandemic, but new research indicates that data was likely skewed. (US News & World Report)

Quote: “Those beds become available for kids who need cardiac surgery, who have been in car accidents. It really has multiple levels of effect.”—Andrew Pavia, chief of the University of Utah’s pediatric infectious diseases division, on the effects of the FDA’s approval of an RSV monoclonal antibody for infants and toddlers (Stat News)

Read: A California-based startup is collecting used tampons to look for biomarkers that may help diagnose endometriosis. (Bustle)

Big step: AI’s here to help press reset on healthcare. How so? Check out GEHC’s report for deets on how AI is helping clinicians and patients build a better future for healthcare. Give it a read.*

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