Pharmpreneur of the week Jim Danahy: ‘Entrepreneurship wasn’t even on my radar.’

SnapshotEducation: BAA Broadcast Journalism, Toronto Metropolitan UniversityCertificate, Motivational Interviewing, Purdue University School of Pharmacy, under professor Bruce Berger PhDRolesSerial entrepreneur since 1994 (after 16 years as an executive with multinational corporations)Grew up around family-owned Clark’s IDA Pharmacy in Orillia, ONCo-Founder, AdhereRx, clinical practice and pharmacy workflow designCEO, CustomerLAB, pharmacy/retail performance analytics and marketingFormer co-owner, Lakewood Guardian Pharmacy & specialty infusion clinic, Saint John, NBFormer co-owner, Howe Sound Pharmacy, Gibsons, BCManaging Director, Trimingham Inc, New York-based boutique turnaround/M&A firm working in the pharmacy, healthcare, health-tech, retail and consumer goods sectorsFounding director, Centre of Excellence in Retail Leadership, Schulich Executive Education Centre, York University teaching senior executives at SDM, Walmart, Loblaw, Home DepotInvestor/equity partner in multiple venture-backed health & retail-related technology startupsBoard member, Retail Advertising and Marketing Association of Canada (now part of Retail Council of Canada, RCC)Past chair of the board, Hope Air, Canada’s only national charity arranging transportation and accommodation for people in financial need to get to healthcare. Hopeair.caWhat excites you about being an entrepreneur?Two things get me out of bed every morning: The first is the healthcare entrepreneur’s freedom to hunt and pounce on untapped opportunities that realize both better patient care AND better business. The second is finding fresh ways to help people love what they do. It’s especially exciting when both happen together.What was your key driving force to become an entrepreneur?Entrepreneurship wasn’t even on my radar until I’d been working and travelling widely with large organizations. Corporate experience gave me invaluable skills and business discipline, but eventually I felt urges to do some things and support causes that didn’t seem possible working for the big guys. How has your entrepreneurial career evolved?After years of rewarding pharmacy projects and investments with partners and clients across North America, the biggest opportunity of my entrepreneurial career presented itself in 2013 and continues today. We had been working and researching with large chains, independents and pharma going back to the mid 1990s to find practical, scalable solutions to medication non-adherence, which Canadian and global evidence shows is by far the most deadly and costly medication-related problem in every community pharmacy in the world. The opportunity revealed itself in two parts. First, an in-depth re-examination of the literature and several large pharmacy financial datasets revealed that that the conventional wisdom suggesting community pharmacies lack the labour bandwidth and reimbursement revenue to solve the adherence challenge is just wrong. It showed that, in fact, evidence-based interventions easily generate adherence revenue to offset all wage and operating costs to do the work, with significant incremental profit to spare. It’s a process engineering challenge not a reimbursement issue. The insight led me to offer this proposition to kick off the keynote speech at Pharmacy U on January 26, 2013:“Medication Adherence should be every community pharmacy’s highest priorityto improve both public health and business viability.”Many owners at the conference button-holed me to agree that the proposition makes great sense, and ask “Is anyone doing it?” Revelation of the second part of the opportunity came shortly after the speech, when I was introduced to a couple of pharmacist-owners in rural BC who had recently built a radical new pharmacy in Gibsons, BC, designed to allow them and their staff pharmacists to sit at the front, in triage-style desks, so they could spend more time with patients. Their description of a “reversed workflow” sounded like it might give pharmacists the added time our analysis showed must become part of daily practice to help patients remove the main barriers that prevent them from taking their meds.I dropped everything and flew across the country to see this novel setup for myself, and discovered “someone was doing it.” One of the co-owners of Howe Sound Pharmacy, Chris Juozaitis, soon became my business partner, and is one of my closest personal friends to this day. Early results showed that reversing the workflow did more than just allow pharmacists to spend more time with patients. Over the next few years, adherence skyrocketed, dispensing revenues followed, and labour costs per script stayed roughly unchanged from the orthodox workflow. An added bonus was that the pharmacists and entire staff enthusiastically endorsed it as a more fulfilling, efficient, less stressful way to work. That said, it was still only happening at one pharmacy. Proving the model is transferable and scalable would be an entrepreneur’s challenge and the elimination of medication non-adherence would become my life’s work.The next step did stretch our entrepreneurial muscles again. We agreed to form a new company called AdhereRx to explore ways to share the news with others. Eventually I joined a group who invested in Howe Sound Pharmacy as an R&D site to continue research alongside investigators from UBC, University of Saskatchewan, and we forged partnerships with some of my tech sector colleagues to develop new analytical tools with the aim to make it easy for any pharmacy team to implement this pharmacist-at-intake workflow with measurable results. I guess you could say entrepreneurs get to make that kind of pivot without actually changing jobs, but it wasn’t without the financial risk and uncertainty that often accompany entrepreneurial pursuits. I set aside other paying projects and took on additional risk with investors to become CEO of AdhereRx. We invested heavily in codifying all operational aspects of implementing the workflow in different settings, and then creating safe, evidence-based training methods and support tools. The evolution continues with investments in new software tools and AI, but patients and the pharmacy benefit immediately with just a table and chairs.How do you define success?For me it must satisfy the two things I mentioned earlier that get me out of bed every morning, hunting and pouncing on untapped opportunities that realize both better patient care AND better business; and finding fresh ways that help people love what they do. When I test my daily decisions against those two things, it seems easier to avoid drifting into the trap of selfish entrepreneurship once profits start to flow.What books do you recommend?The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber – Every AdhereRx client gets a copy to learn the difference between working IN our businesses, which is self-employment, and ON our businesses, which is entrepreneurship. Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson MD – A guide to understand change and how to bring people with you. The Innovator’s Prescription by Clayton Christensen – another seminal read for innovators in the healthcare sector. Health For All, Dr. Jane PhilpottWhat advice would you give to colleagues who want to become entrepreneurs?Be sure entrepreneurship is what you want. Self-employment is a viable option for many pharmacy professionals, which gives a degree of freedom without taking on the risks and uncertainty of entrepreneurship. If it is for you, experiment as much as possible. Everybody’s brand of entrepreneurship is different. It is a form of self-expression you must discover for yourself. And be open to let it evolve. Build your network of colleagues and mentors and start paying it forward by helping others.

Pharmpreneur of the week Jim Danahy: ‘Entrepreneurship wasn’t even on my radar.’

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