Beyond the Counter: Meet Our Expert Pharmacists

MEET OUR EXPERT PHARMACISTS:

Becca Wilson, PharmD, Senior Manager, Pharmacy Operations

Pharmacy experience:

I started as an intern in a retail chain pharmacy, while attending Ohio Northern University. After graduation, I worked my way through a few roles to become a Pharmacy Manager for a major pharmacy chain. I came to CoverMyMeds in 2019 as a Staff Pharmacist looking for a change from the retail space.

I grew into a Clinical Pharmacist on that team, then eventually moved on to serve as the Pharmacist in Charge for the CoverMyMeds Pharmacy site in Columbus, Ohio as well as help manage the Digital Pharmacy team. During my time at CoverMyMeds, I have worked with a few programs including CoverMyMeds Specialty Pharmacy and Pharmacy as a Service. I also recently assisted in the coming together of our CoverMyMeds Pharmacy network, as the business lead on our pharmacy entity realignment and unification under the CoverMyMeds brand.

What barriers do you help clients and patients overcome in your daily work?

My primary work right now is with Pharmacy as a Service, which is focused on removing clients’ barriers to providing pharmacy services to their patients. Opening your own pharmacy is cumbersome and expensive, especially if you want to provide service across the United States. There are regulatory costs related to licensure, inventory stocking costs, scalability pains and more.

By taking on some of those operational burdens through partnership with the other CoverMyMeds pharmacies, we can help operate diverse programs that support patients’ specific wants or needs that aren’t met elsewhere.

How does your experience as a pharmacist enrich your work with CoverMyMeds?

Pharmacists are placed, like many of the programs at CoverMyMeds, smack dab in the middle of a patient journey. We have perspective from working with providers, health plans, patients and other pharmacies. The biggest thing we all have in common is wanting to help our patients. I use that perspective every day when helping make process changes or in how I communicate. Assuming positive intent when working with others can go a long way in finding an optimal solution to a problem or building something new.

What do you love about being a pharmacist?

I love working alongside other CoverMyMeds and McKesson teammates. Pharmacy is a highly collaborative industry externally, as I mentioned, but also internally. The pharmacists and technicians I interact with are genuinely wonderful people, focused on doing the right thing for the patient and supporting one another.

I also get to work with different branches of business including legal, compliance, IT, product, data and finance. The opportunity to learn from folks in different knowledge areas and being able to reciprocate by sharing more about pharmacy, makes me feel very lucky.

MEET OUR EXPERT PHARMACISTS:

Dan Kelly, PharmD, Lead Clinical Solutions Support Consultant

Pharmacy experience:

I studied pharmacy at The Ohio State University College of Pharmacy and have been with CoverMyMeds for more than 11 years.

What barriers do you help clients and patients overcome in your daily work?

At CoverMyMeds, we focus on providing access and affordability solutions to pharmaceutical manufacturers to help patients start and stay on their prescribed therapy.

In the current era of pharmacy, there is a complex variety of prescription drug characteristics that leads to different benefit coverage types, distribution channels and so on. This complexity necessitates unique targeted solutions to fit that specific brands’ needs.

My role is to evaluate the drug and make recommendations as to which of our solutions best fit the needs for that drug, deliver the most value to the manufacturer and ultimately, provide the best support to patients.

How does your experience as a pharmacist enrich your work with CoverMyMeds?

Being a pharmacist helps me evaluate a prescription drug from a clinical perspective and compare it to established similar drugs as a proxy reference. This helps to identify the most likely access and affordability challenges to make specific recommendations.

Having a background in pharmacy also helps significantly in understanding real-world implications about the administrative aspects of the practice of pharmacy and medicine. Knowing the intricacies of how pharmacies and clinics operate helps to make detailed proposals for patient support programs.

What do you love about being a pharmacist?

What drew me into pharmacy was the science of pharmacology, how drugs work in the human body. Over time, this has evolved into a much greater interest in clinical outcomes, and how that interacts with the patients' benefits and the associated financial value of that for the patient and the pharmacy.

The pharmaceutical industry is one that really champions innovation, research and development. The continuous new results keep every day interesting and forces me to constantly learn new things.