I am NCPA

PHARMACY: Rick is the president and CEO of InTouch Pharmaceuticals in Valparaiso, Ind. The business, a long-term care pharmacy, has 144 employees and services 9,000-10,000 beds. The location measures approximately 27,000 square feet. The pharmacy operates on a short-cycle system and processes at least a million prescriptions annually.

Rick says InTouch operates based on five core values: integrity, innovation, excellence, accountability and humility.

EDUCATION: Rick has a bachelor’s degree from the Purdue University School of Pharmacy.

SERVICES OFFERED: InTouch provides services to skilled nursing facilities. This includes sterile product and non-sterile compounding. It has a variety of IVs, from pain management to total parental nutrition, along with IV main volume and IV piggyback. InTouch also supplies automated dispensing devices in its facilities and offers full consulting services.

InTouch has its own transportation department instead of working with couriers. Rick says that helps him ensure their interactions with clients are high quality. “You can’t fully manage who the courier hires or how they interact with patients,” Rick says. “That person, that’s the only person who sees our client regularly, sometimes multiple times a day.” He adds, “We can control it better.”

TECH TOOLS: Rick keeps his eyes out for technology that helps him run his business more effectively. The company’s founding in 2004 is a prime example. InTouch was launched using a fully automated short-cycle system that was cutting-edge for LTC pharmacy at the time.

“I knew there was a high potential for med error just because of the quantity of meds that are dispensed. And I felt being on a fully automated short-cycle system would definitely reduce the opportunity for med error. I found out later that it also reduced waste and cost, and it streamlined the administration process greatly,” he says, adding that he sees similar potential for the use of AI tools in pharmacies.

“We’re getting a lot of our orders electronically and we’re just taking that information and manually plugging it back in again into our systems. I think at some point that AI is going to help a great deal, which I think will reduce our labor load and reduce potential for inappropriate med errors.”

LTC AT HOME: Rick sees great potential in LTC-at-home services and has started scaling that service up within InTouch. They see about 900 patients discharged from skilled facilities a month.

“We’re thinking that there’s some opportunity there to continue to take care of them in their home, which I think is a win-win because the resident wants to be in their home and they want to be independent as long as possible,” he says.

VALUE OF NCPA: Rick says that part of what he loves about NCPA is that it emphasizes the business aspect of pharmacy more than other associations.

“We’re all independents and we’re all in business,” he says, adding that NCPA is critical to political advocacy for independent pharmacies, including in PBM reform.

“NCPA is critical to what we’re trying to do in supporting pharmacy, and then in any other way that it can in order to keep our doors open.”