A passion for community pharmacy

We’ve all driven through that town where the only store you see for miles around is a huge mega store.  To me they seem like barren wastelands, devoid of personality.   Independent, local businesses enrich the communities that they serve.  Not only by keeping those communities as unique as the people that live there, but by being an active part of those communities.  Whether you donate to charities, participate in local events or provide a unique service that helps your community to thrive, your independent pharmacy should be not just another business, but an integral facet of your community.

Instead of going on about all of the things you can do to be active in your community, I’m going to take a different tack today and talk about what we do at RMS to stand behind our belief in community, local business and independent pharmacy. 

As you might imagine, we go through a fair amount of office supplies at our Washington state headquarters.  Changing where we purchased these supplies was the beginning of our journey to better represent the market that we serve.  Today all of our office supplies, kitchen necessities and other sundries are purchased from local independent companies.  We found better service, better quality and, in many cases, lower prices.  Sound familiar? 

In 2012 we took our commitment to independent and institutional pharmacies one step further by implementing a new prescription co-pay reimbursement plan.  Employees here at RMS are reimbursed for 100% of our prescription co-pays as long as we fill our prescriptions at an independent, independent chain, or institutional pharmacy.  Anyone who fills prescriptions at a big box chain store is on their own.

Another side to supporting independent business is supporting community.  Just like communities can’t thrive without a strong, stable core of businesses, the business itself can’t thrive without a community that’s active, alive and involved. At RMS we have customers all across the country.  Likewise, many of our employees are located outside of our main offices, from Florida to California and many places in between. We know it’s important to support as many of these different communities as possible.  At RMS, employees are given the latitude to contribute to our communities with paid time-off for us to volunteer with local charities and non-profit organizations.

Finally, we want to help our customers be strong supportive members of their communities.  We believe that helping independent pharmacies to flourish and grow is one way to accomplish this, but there are other ways that we can help as well.  That’s why if you attended this year’s PDS conference, you know we donated $2,000 to the local school of the pharmacy winner’s choice, in their name.  You can hear our VP of Sales and Marketing, Mike Gross, talk more about this donation and the corporate culture that drives us to make these kinds of choices within our company here.

By partnering with RMS, you put your faith in us, just like your customers put their faith in you.  My hope in sharing these insights into our corporate culture has not only been so you can see we take this responsibility seriously and continue to strive to stand behind our customers in any way that we can, but that you may take some inspiration from our actions for your independent pharmacy.  Be good custodians of your community, and leave it better than it was when you came.

Karen Deckard came to RMS with a background in retail and customer service, and was initially brought on board as a Sales Assistant and managed IIAS certifications for RMS’s pharmacy POS customers. Today, Karen works as a Customer Success Manager, striving to provide independent and institutional pharmacies with the tools and resources they need to succeed in today’s competitive pharmacy market.