Transcription of Catherine Cloudman for the show Maine’s Pharmacy Experts #164
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 164: Maine’s Pharmacy Experts. Airing for the first time on Sunday, November 2nd, 2014, pharmacists do much more than dispense medication. As pharmacy science experts, educators, and community liaisons, they are important members of the healthcare team.
Today, we speak with guests who have a special interest in the education of Maine’s pharmacy experts. Catherine Cloudman, principal at Apothecary By Design, Portland’s economic development director, Greg Mitchell, Dr. Jim Krebs, Assistant Dean of Experiential Education at the University of New England, and newly minted pharmacist, Dr. Kayla Stewart of Apothecary By Design. We know that you will enjoy getting to know these members of the healthcare team. Thank you for joining us.
Here on Love Maine Radio, we think a lot about the wellness of our communities, not simply from an individual standpoint but really from a collaborative standpoint. These individuals that I have with me today have been thinking about this quite a lot themselves. We have Catherine Cloudman who is one of the founding partners of Apothecary By Design and also Greg Mitchell, Portland City Economic Development Director. Well, if you have some thoughts on what’s making Portland a healthier place to live? I’m glad you’ve come in to talk to us today. Thank you.
Greg: Thanks for having us.
Dr. Lisa: We’re going to talk more about the University of New England and the Pharmacy School, which is really a big interest of Apothecary By Design. First, I wanted to talk to you about why it is that we need to have new businesses coming into Portland and doing things that are slightly different and taking risks? Because this isn’t something that we always think about as we’re going through economic challenges.
Catherine: We closed on our financing for our business the day before the stock market crashed in October of 2008. It was a very scary time to be starting a brand new business, but myself and my 4 business partners, we were well on our way and we opened our doors almost 6 years ago and it has been a very interesting ride. We wouldn’t be sitting here today without the help of a bunch of other community partners. The City of Portland and Greg, in particular, have been very supportive of our business as have FAME and Bangor Savings Bank. We have a terrific working relationship with the University of New England and their Pharmacy School. A lot of those things have come together on such a way that have allowed us to grow the business and find great people, and fund our business and fund our growth. We’ve grown to having 70 employees and 80 million in revenue this year.
Dr. Lisa: This must be music to your ears, Greg. You must really enjoy hearing about businesses that took a chance and started something new on the deepest part of the recession, and then have found success. Actually, I want to say you were recently recognized INC 5000. You’re one of the top growing business, I believe, across the United States?
Catherine: That’s correct.
Greg: One of the most gratifying aspects of my job is watching businesses grow and prosper. In the case of Apothecary By Design, the city really works hard to basically create the environment to support growth. Well, the company partners were risk takers on their business. I want to point out they are risk takers in where they decided to invest. They’re located down in Bayside which is the new front door to downtown Portland. This is an area that the city concentrated on extensively with an area wide plan to support the retransformation of an industrial area that has scrap yards, warehouses to repopulate and repurpose it for businesses like Apothecary.
They were risk takers into where they invested. They’re one of the first. I call them a pioneer in terms of supporting redevelopment effort in Bayside. You can see the results of that today with Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, more housing, more commercial investment. It’s enormously gratifying to set the stage for investment to makes sure that the city is doing what it can in a supportive role, everything from road to utilities. Also in the case of Apothecary, we ended up with direct financing relationship to help support one of their phases of growth. They’ve grown beyond their initial location to a second location.
Having those kind of anchors in our community, they’re creating significant high wage job employment and taking advantage of the programs that are offered, for example, at UNE creates the full circle for making an economy work well.
Dr. Lisa: As we think about health and wellness, we think about the ability to find places to run or find places to walk, or have clean air or have clean water and some very basic health fundamentals. What we also need to think about are have places for people to work. You need to have places where people can get health insurance, and there are so many different layers of need when it comes to wellness.
I guess I think I just read a statistic about unemployment and how it really impacts families. I believe the statistic was something like families who deal with unemployment are more likely to go through emotional turmoil like divorce. On the opposite side of that, having jobs available like the 70 jobs at Apothecary By Design or the pharmacy jobs through UNE, that’s a really important thing.
Greg: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. We’ve got to have a pathway for employment kind of an economic ladder starting at entry level positions and working your way up to support growth. We’re striving for that in terms of supporting growth in our economy with a very diversified base and creating that environment. Again, when you talk about health and wellness, we’re proud of the fact that in the area in Bayside, the city planned design and invested in the Bayside Trail to interconnect hardscape trail system through Bayside, all the way round the peninsula to Back Cove.
We’re taking advantage of our water views, the picturesque views but also people mobility. We’re a very walkable community. We’re trying to be full service not just in the type of businesses that we attract and the type of employment, but also to create the right environment to move people from housing to work or just take a break during the day.
Catherine: I’ll just speak to that little bit at Apothecary By Design level. Some of what you’re speaking to Lisa is stability and creating stability for people, despite whatever their ground might be. I think one of the things that we feel really proud about is having created jobs across a real economic spectrum. Whether it’s a cashier or someone in shipping and fulfillment, or a nurse care coordinator or a clinician, one of our pharmacists, it’s a really wide spectrum. We are also really dedicated and committed to providing a full spectrum of benefits for these folks as well, so that there is some stability and safety to them coming to work each day.
Whether it is a flexible work day or health insurance that we pay a very high percentage of, or our 401K plan where we have a mandatory contribution that we make to people who are qualified to participate in our 401K plan. We’re really focused on trying to do a lot of those things that provide them the stability because if they’re feeling stable, they’re going to be more productive at work. That’s part of what makes us more successful in what we’re trying to do for our patients.
Dr. Lisa: Wellness is very important to Apothecary By Design. I know that a lot of the work that you do focuses around specific areas like, for example, hepatitis and fertility and other issues that are more disease specific or more problem specific. At Apothecary By Design, you actually are focusing on also keeping people … Getting people before they get to a place of disease. You have supplements. You have educational sessions, and you really have people who understand … You have a naturopathic doctor who works with you. You have people who understand what is necessary to keep people on an even keel.
Catherine: That’s true, and I think that is very much our focus and we’re very much an integrated pharmacy across all aspects of pharmacy. The nutritional health and well-being is a very big component of that. Part of what we’re trying to do is look at how to help people manage side effects of medications that they might be on, and to the extent that we can support them in such a way that keeps them healthy and keeps them from getting more sick than they might be. Then that’s good for everybody in the healthcare system.
Dr. Lisa: Greg, it must be interesting for you. You were born and raised in Maine. You went to Cheverus. Not too far way to Vermont to get your undergraduate degree. It must be interesting for you to come back and see what has happened. You spent some time in [inaudible 00:12:14], and you’ve been all around the state working with municipalities and also as a private consultant. Portland has changed a lot.
Greg: The landscape has changed dramatically over the last 30 years. I remember growing up here in the late ‘70s and the Old Port was not what it is today. I remember my parents telling me, “That area is off limits. That’s not an area that you should be going.” What a dramatic change to see that kind of hop of activity, that vitality, which is serving as a magnet and really is selling Portland’s lifestyle.
Nationally and internationally, we continue to make a number of short lists in terms of safe place for people to raise their kids. A very hip place, a foodie place, of course. It has to do with just the feel and the buzz of what’s going on in the community. Very metropolitan experience at a very small scale, and it’s very intimate that way with the Old … It’s 6 degrees of separation, I say, in Maine and Portland’s 2 degrees of separation in terms of people’s connections and overlap.
It’s an easy story to tell and it’s one that we’re working very hard on, not just from a visitor experience in arts and entertainment but also from a business experience. Hence, the reason we’re here today. We’re a good place to start a business. We’re a good place to grow a business and Apothecary is evidence that you can not just survive, but you can really thrive in Maine and attract the talent that you need to support a workforce of 70 jobs in a relatively short period of time. It’s phenomenal for me to be a part of the experience and to have a hand in trying to shape and direct the economy. It would all be for not without business investment, I’ll say that.
Catherine: Well, piggybacking on that, one of the things that is really important … I know this is an initiative of the city and it’s something that we’re certainly benefiting. That is the hip vibe that Portland has makes it a lot easier to attract and retain qualified, young professionals to the community. It’s a reinforcing kind of thing. Here we have this fabulous partnership with the University of New England and we provide a great experiential education for the students that are within our … That come and visit our pharmacy. We probably have 6 plus students in our pharmacy at any given time.
It’s a great opportunity for us to get to know them and them to get to know us. If they were all graduating from Pharmacy School and then moving out of the city of Portland because there’s no jobs to be found here or they don’t love the community, then we’d be in a very different place but that’s not the case. The students that come here and attend University of New England or Husson¸ or many of the other schools in the area fall in love with Portland and fall in love with Maine. They want to try and figure out how to be creative and how to stay, and for all the reasons that Greg talked about. That’s a pretty fun thing to be able to segue way them out of their graduate degree program into a position enabling them to live in a city that is really a fun place to be right now.
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Dr. Lisa: What’s interesting to me also is that what you are doing and offering an educational alliance with the University of New England is something that required you to be able to have some vision when you first started creating these plans. We know that we needed more pharmacies, more pharmacists. We know that we have an aging population. The type of education that you’re offering at Apothecary By Design, I think, is unique for these students.
Catherine: Oh, I think it’s very unique. For one thing, you don’t find a lot of pharmacies out there that have the breadths and depths, the services that we provide. They’re seeing both alternative therapies and our nutritional health and well-being area. They’re seeing compounding both non-sterile and sterile compounding. They’re seeing the more traditional retail pharmacy environment, and they’re also seems specialty pharmacy, which is a up and coming fast growing area of pharmacy where they’re really getting ingrained and in a specific disease state, and learning about it in an in-depth way from a clinical perspective.
Seeing that range of services is a unique experience for them. We don’t just have them in our store or in our specialty pharmacy doing mundane tasks. We have them doing research and presenting to our clinical team on a particular topic. That’s really educational for our team and it’s a great experience for them to stand up and present in front of a group of clinical people who are going to ask them difficult questions but probing questions. It’s a great experience for them and it’s a great experience for us as well.
Dr. Lisa: It must also be helpful for them to be able to have this. I guess this front row seat in a new business because I’m thinking Greg of your situation on economics and medicine for quite a long time were not necessary talking to one another. Now, we can’t help but talk to one another so to have students who are going through and to remind them that, yes, this is a business like all businesses for us all to be able to develop our brains in such a way so that we are cognizant of that.
Greg: Absolutely, Catherine talked about capturing that student population. It’s graduating and that’s the target audience of ours. We find that once people experience Portland in Maine, they fall in love with it and the next step is we’ve got to find them an employment opportunity. Professional employment opportunity is challenging, that they feel is the right next step from school so they can support themselves and their family. We couldn’t be happier to see business cooperate and collaborate, and be seamless between their business practices and the educational opportunities. We continue to strive to do that from the city perspective in terms of making those connections but actually have relationships that are working to give those students a different experience, a business experience, a hands-on experience that they can now capitalize on that.
Our whole visit, they stay in May. We continue to see employment growth in this sector to employ them. Even if they leave the state, they have skills that are very marketable that will make them much more attractive in the workplace. It’s the way of the future. I think all schools are recognizing that to be successful there has to be a pathway to employment beyond the degree. Those business relationships are critical and so important from my perspective.
We’re continuing to try to find ways to create matches. It happens organically and naturally. If there’s ways that we can collaborate and support our educational institutions providing a trained workforce to businesses and then offering those kinds of high quality experiences that Catherine is describing are invaluable to really keep that person committed to Portland for the longer time. It’s helping drive down our average age in Portland which is below and it’s driving up our educational attainment.
Our Portland residents 25 years and older 45%of our resident population, 25 years and older, has a bachelor’s degree or high level of education. That is a phenomenal statistic that compares well across this country with major metropolitan areas, including Boston. We have some phenomenal assets to capitalize on if we can just support an economy to grow business, grow jobs and capture that youth, attract that youth here at Portland.
Catherine: What’s really valuable in terms of that experiential education is that they do see all aspects of the business. They’re not isolated to just some of the clinical activities. They really do understand what are the economics of dispensing a particular medication all the way through to counseling the patient and all aspects of how that works. What drives our economy on a national basis is entrepreneurism. There is no question that here in Maine it’s an even greater extent, right? You have to be creative and entrepreneurial for the most part here in our state. That’s really what drives our economy here.
To the extent, these students can come out of their graduate degree program, not just with the clinical expertise but with the business skills to be able to thrive in an entrepreneurial community. That’s a real benefit to us as business owners but also to themselves, particularly in healthcare. We have seen the importance of developing the business skill side of the equation as we move through all of the changes that are happening in healthcare.
Greg: I totally agree with those comments. From my perspective, this company was a startup in 2009 and here we are today with a company with 70 jobs and 80 million in revenue. From the inside looking at that kind of growth and expansion for the youth to see that to see how that’s managed, in addition to the services that are provided, is a phenomenal education. It doesn’t get any better than that.
I’ve seen that with my boys and some of their employment. I have encouraged them to take those kind of risks with startup companies. Nothing against older and more established and mature companies but companies with startups, you stand against so much more insight, so much more knowledge by watching the growth, the identification of market opportunities and their ability to capture that opportunity and be successful.
Six years is a very short period of time for any company’s evolution to achieve the level of success of this company Apothecary has achieved. I’ve been doing this for 30 years and I’ve seen business evolution from start to finish. Again, that educational interface with the workforce and the training but to reinforce Catherine’s comments on entrepreneurship training, it doesn’t get any better than living it.
Dr. Lisa: I’m also struck by the necessity of communication skills and the ability to communicate across a broad spectrum. If you are a pharmacy student, you need to be able to talk with other pharmacists. You need to be able to talk with physicians and healthcare providers. You need to be able to talk with patients. This is really no different than any other successful business where if you’re a business person, you need to be able to talk sales. You need to be able to talk numbers. I think that we’re heading away from that siloed approach to education which is very specialty driven, and we really are starting to understand that communication is key.
Catherine: I think that’s true and I know you’re going to be speaking with one of our new hires. She was a pharmacist and she does a wonderful job presenting, and has given a number of presentations to our clinical staff. I think you’ll enjoy your time with her. That’s been one of the things. In fact, we had her present when we had the year accreditation committee come in for our on-site visit. That was an example of a newly graduated student. In fact, I don’t even think she had graduated by the time [inaudible 00:27:14] actually came in to visit.
She had to be able to have the wherewithal and the comfort to stand up in front of these on-site accreditors and speak to some of our quality initiatives that we were working on. Our clinical staff needs to have the ability to go out and be on a sales call with practitioners and talk to them about the range of services that we provide. Also, that’s the business angle of that visit, but also they need the credibility around the particular clinical topic that they’re speaking to so that they have the respect of the persons across the table.
It’s exactly what you’re speaking to, Lisa. They really need both, one hand on the clinical dashboard and the other hand on the business dashboard, so that they can relaly bring those 2 things together in a way that makes them credible and confident in a variety of different settings.
Dr. Lisa: Well, I’m very excited about the work that you’re both doing. I think also having grown up in Maine and seeing all of the shits and transitions … and I believe that when we moved here in ‘77, marginal way and where Apothecary is in the Bayside area just looked incredibly different. It’s so gratifying all of the shifting. I know Maine magazine and Old Port magazine were excited to see what’s coming up. We get to speak to a lot of people who are doing interesting things and to know that this is the same types of interesting things that are going on in healthcare. It’s really wonderful. It’s really a great thing.
Well, we’ve been speaking with Greg Mitchell and Catherine Cloudman. Greg is Portland City economic development director and Catherine Cloudman is one of the founding partners of Apothecary By Design, and encourage people to learn more about what Apothecary By Design is doing in this area and also to learn more about the city of Portland. Greg, is there a website or a way that people might learn more about what’s happening economically in the city?
Greg: Absolutely. We’ve got a couple of websites we can refer people to, city of Portland, Maine. The other website that’s worth the visit is called liveworkportland.org. That is an arm of the city, a nonprofit that we’ve established that’s focusing on marketing and bringing us outside of Maine and internationally. The emphasis of those programs are people recruitment, people attraction, entrepreneurship and support. Both of those websites people can contact me directly at city hall, and we’d love to interface with folks. We want to learn more about what’s going on in Portland.
Dr. Lisa: Catherine, Apothecary By Design. How can people learn more?
Catherine: Apothecarybydesign.com is a great place to visit and also follow our Facebook page. We have ongoing posts happening regularly about wellness activities that we’re working on, events that people are presenting at and just updates on what’s happening with our business.
Dr. Lisa: Well, thank you very much Catherine Cloudman and Greg Mitchell. We appreciate your doing all the wonderful work you’re doing for the city of Portland and beyond and keep it up.
Catherine: Thank you.
Greg: Thank you.