Transcription of Future of Medicine #56
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast show number 56, The Future of Medicine. Airing for the first time on October 7th 2012 on WLOB and WPEI Radio Portland, Maine. Also available streaming on wlobradio.com. On today’s show, we feature Maine Medical Association Executive Vice-President Gordon Smith as well as founder of Apothecary by Design, Catherine Cloudman.
The future of medicine is something that we on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast are working toward every week, something that I feel very strongly is important. I graduated from medical school in ’96 and family medicine residency in 1999 and went on to get a master’s in public health and a preventive medicine fellowship. These were all my traditional medical training. It was doing the same sorts of training that most doctors go through in the United States.
BY 2006, I knew that I needed something more. I needed to go outside the bounds of traditional Western medicine and see what else I could offer my patients. This is when I went back and I learned traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture. I believe very strongly in the idea that this is how we need to heal our medical system. We need to be reaching back into the past, looking at healing systems that have been helping patients for thousands and thousands of years and marrying this with moving forward medical informatics, evidence-based medicine, computers, knowledge, research.
These are all things that we need to be taking into consideration as we look forward. I think this is an exciting time to be a physician. It’s an exciting time for me to be practicing medicine. In my own practice, I am able to create a very personalized approach for patients. I integrate acupuncture and nutrition counseling, dietary recommendations, behavior and pattern change with all the latest medical knowledge and be able to connect with providers in the community who are doing more high-tech procedures, people who are engaging in modalities that require quite a lot of futuristic thinking. I think I’m offering the type of care that most doctors want to be offering their patients as they move forward in medicine today.
On today’s show, we have two individuals who have been working in the area of medicine for many years. Although they’re not doctors, they do know a lot about medicine and about health and feeling. Gordon Smith is the executive vice-president of the Maine Medical Association and has been affiliated with that organization for decades now. He’s seen the many changes that physicians within the state and patients in the state have undergone. He knows that there ways that we can help things move forward in a very positive way.
Catherine Cloudman is the founder of Apothecary by Design here in Portland. Apothecary by Design really believes in the importance of offering patients high quality medication and education and at the same time, reaching back into the past and offering them a very caring attitude towards health and feeling. We believe that Gordon and Catherine are both two very good examples of how we can move forward into the future of medicine. Thank you for joining us.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is pleased to be sponsored by the University of New England. As part of our collaboration, we offer a segment we call Wellness Innovations. This week’s Wellness Innovation is the University of New England’s Interprofessional Education Collaborative or IPEC. IPEC is an intercollegiate initiative designed to support and enhance the education of practitioners, scholars and researches across health professions. Their mission is to educate these individuals to work together and with patients and clients for relationship-centered healthcare that is comprehensive, collaborative, caring, safe and continuous throughout the life cycle.
This is UNE’s contribution to the future of integrated medicine by exposing learning professionals to a team-based training earlier on in their career. Future communication and client-based care will become more instinctive. For more information on this Wellness Innovation, visit doctorlisa.org. For more information on UNE, visit une.edu.
Speaker 1: This portion of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast has been brought to you by the University of New England, UNE, an innovative health sciences university grounded in the liberal arts. UNE is the number one educator of health professionals in Maine. Learn more about the University of New England at une.edu.
Dr. Lisa: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour is committed to the notion that we’re in a significant time of really healthy transition in the medical world. We like to talk to people who have been in the medical world for a while who can tell us what the history has been like and what things are looking like moving forward. We thought it was appropriate to have Gordon Smith, who is the executive vice-president of the Maine Medical Association come in and talk to us today. Thanks for coming in, Gordon.
Gordon: Thank you for having me, Lisa.
Dr. Lisa: Gordon, you and I have known each other for a while because when I was getting my master’s degree in public health after my residency program, I came up and I observed what you were doing with the legislature. I know that that’s part of what you do but there’s just so many that the Maine Medical Association does. Why don’t you tell us about them?
Gordon: I think that people probably have a misconception about what the Maine Medical Association is today. It was established in 1853 by 15 or so physicians who met in Brunswick at the Tontine Hotel in April 28th. We just held our 159th annual meeting. It has a rich tradition of representing physicians but also protecting public health and speaking on behalf of patient. There has obviously I don’t know of any association today that 160 years after its founding is operating under the same mission and the governance principles today that it did when it started.
There’ve been a lot of tremendous change in the healthcare community. It really did start with the … It was one of the 50 state organizations that make up the American Medical Association which is still vilified for opposing Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. They forget that now the AMA supported the Affordable Care Act or Obama Care to some. There’s been organized medicine as it’s sometimes referenced. It’s a much more diversified group than it used to be and it has to be because half of our members are going to be female.
The vast majority of our members are going to be employed and not in independent practicing, one that’s changed a lot of things. Although there’ll still be some who choose that route. It’s been a wonderful organization over time. We have about a dozen employees and we have three lobbies and attorneys. I’m one of them. We do go to the State House every day that the legislatures there and we were involved in the last two years and 300 pieces of legislation. Many of which involved public health and I think that your listeners would be impressed with everything from eradicating BPA from children’s toys to protecting out healthy Maine partnerships, protecting physical education in schools, prohibiting cyberbullying, a lot of those things. The association is very proud of its track record on.
In November, I understand you’re having a program with Ed Miller of the American Lung Association Maine. Ed and I had been involved in virtually every tobacco control issue in Maine since about 1979. We started along with a wonderful physician by the name of Bill Nersesian, the Maine Coalition on Smoking or Health that’s now been merged into the Maine Public Health Association. We were galvanized when at that time Governor Brennan vetoed a bill to prohibit smoking in a jury room.
If you can imagine today, we’ve been so successful probably 25 pieces of legislation that have protected clean air in Maine and particularly indoor air. Now, we’re active in trying to protect public parks and beaches. At that time, imagine that a governor would veto a bill that suggested that if you were asked by the government to serve in a little jury room for hours and of the time that people could fill that room with smoke.
There’s a lot of wonderful history of public health activities in Maine. Many of those things are now challenged under the new political dynamic that we have. We’ve been busy as ever unfortunately defending some of the gains that we’d already made. It’s been difficult in this environment to be proactive because we’ve had to react to so many things that we thought had been settled years ago like the value of vaccination.
Dr. Lisa: It is interesting to me because as we’re talking I’m remembering what as a young recently finished family medicine resident and family doctor, I was listening to legislation that was about smoking I believe in bars and restaurants. Now, people who are young, not that I’m not young but let’s say 20 year olds, to them it’s unfathomable that you’d go into a bar or a restaurant and there would be cigarette smoke in Maine and in fact in the big chunk of the country but that was not that long ago.
Gordon: No, it wasn’t but it’s been one of my great successes and probably because of that, fewer teenagers are smoking more than should but nonetheless. It’s all about if you can’t smoke in a restaurant, you can’t smoke in a workplace. You can’t smoke at a public place. You’ll begin to get data and maybe just throw that and if the only place we can smoke is outside. It was a very big moment when through the Bangor City Council passed the ordinance that you couldn’t smoke in an automobile with a young child. That was huge and that led to similar legislation on the state level.
It’s that kind of thing that because it’s about protecting us from secondhand smoke. People have a right to do what they’re going to do but not if it affects other people.
Dr. Lisa: Your background isn’t in medicine though. Your background as I think you said was as a lawyer. There are other lawyers on staff with you. Why is it necessary for lawyers to get involved in health?
Gordon: That’s a good question. You want to know how the rank had found them as with the Maine Medical Association feel about the Maine Medical Association now having three lawyers. It’s just the sign of the times. There are some doctors that run medical sites across the country. Running an association today requires a skillset that’s different than most physicians have. I did get into this field absolutely because of my interest in advocacy. That got me in politics. That got me involved in law and then law got me involved in associations.
It just so happened when I was practicing privately with a law firm that we had a lot of association clients and we lobbied a lot because we were in Augustine and we were the biggest law firm in Augustine at that time. There were six of us. I just love the association work. I left after few years to just do the realtors association. It’s a wonderful association and the medical association. One day a week I’d work at the realtor office and four days a week at the medical association. You could see what direction this is moving in and then eventually things became difficult to do both.
Healthcare today is enormously complicated. I feel every day that our other two lawyers are very, very capable and myself. We have all we can do to keep up on the federal and state activities. We have 3700 medical students, residents and doctors to help us do it.
Dr. Lisa: Tell me what types of things on a day-to-day basis you deal with when it comes to residents, medical students and doctors. What are you actually offering for the individual physician?
Gordon: We offer different things at different cohorts in a doctor’s life. For the medical students, we help them learn about organized medicine or what they may be facing when they get out. With the residents, we help them with their first contracts of employment. With the older physicians, we help them retire. Depending upon where you are in your career, the medical association might have a lot of different things to offer.
We’ve had to change the menu of services, a great, great deal to accommodate doctors who are employed because when you’re employed, you’re not paying your own malpractice premiums so you’re probably not all that. You may not be interested in Quality Forum. If you’re practicing in a big system like Maine Health or Eastern Maine Healthcare then you’re getting a lot of services available for most folks. You may not even relate to Maine Medical Association at all until you have a problem. That problem could come at the Board of Medicine. It could come in the malpractice case. It could come as an issue with your employer.
We’ve been able to maintain an infrastructure to help physicians with whatever that problem is. We also provide a lot of service at the level of the employer. We have a very, very successful peer review program where we’ll send out let’s say there’s a solo practicing urologist in a small community in Maine. We’ll send three board-certified urologist out to that practice once a year, once every two years and do a complete analysis working with that doctor in a confidential peer review for educational purposes because that’s just essential today.
That program has grown exponentially over the last 25 years. We do a lot of quality improvement work, patient safety work. We do a lot of consumer-patient engagement with very big supporters of Quality Counts. I just got two years as the boy chair of the organization. In doing wonderful things as we try to transform the healthcare system to a more patient-centered system.
Dr. Lisa: We had Dr. Lisa Letourneau and my sister Dr. Amy Belisle from Quality Counts just recently on the show.
Gordon: That whole staff, now Quality Counts has almost 10 employees. They’re almost as big as the Maine Medical Association and that’s causing its own unique issues because it collocated with us in that building. Probably, we’re going to be able to help them find out the space in the next few months. I’m so proud of what they’re doing in transforming the practices of primary care. I think people would be impressed to know that we are not out there defending existing medical care every day. We are out there trying to make it better, trying to increase patient safety. We know there’s a lot of problems.
We know that if patients can get more engaged in their own care, this is a featured presentation at our annual meeting at Quality Counts last week with this e-patient, Dave deBronkart. He was incredible. An MIT graduate who had metastatic stage four cancer who engaged himself into online communities with other cancer patients. Found incredibly valuable information on the internet working with his physician. He can give that talk about how important it is for patients to be engaged as partners. It’s about patients now.
The old system really was designed around physicians. It really wasn’t designed around patients. That situation, that is now being transformed. I think it’s hard change for people particularly in the transition to electronic medical records. It has been way more difficult than anybody can imagine because it completely transformed it in a way that you practice. I’m 61 years old. If I was a physician, I would probably retire before I do it because I’ve seen the pain of doctors feeling so good about working with patients and how many patients they could see. All of a sudden now, they’ve got this thing between them and the patient.
It is really painful. It’s not nearly as painful. If you’ve grown up like my adult brothers have with the internet, with technology, with handheld devices, they think that’s all you know then you easily can adjust to it. For people like my age who grew up before all of that, it’s really been painful. We know we have to go there. At least not most people believe that we have to go to an electronic system. The new generation of patients, I’m not going to stand for the fact that anywhere in this world you can go and put your card, a plastic card into a machine and get money in that denomination, in that country and get your bank balance instantaneously within seconds.
Yet how many of us personally have tried to get a medical record or a page of a medical record to take to a specialist or to take care of our sick child and it took weeks. I recently had a situation with my own family where a lab test was sent to the wrong doctor in the different state just because the doctor had … The only commonality was this doctor had the same last name as the doctor that my family member was seeing.
In this case, I don’t think she might be saying that. My wife gets this call from a doctor from Mass General saying, “We have this lab test, Mrs. Smith and you’re not a patient here. Where is this supposed to go?” Three states away, how does that happened in May 2012? We have to do better.
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Dr. Lisa: As you know, the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is focused on the mind, body and soul. Sometimes our bodies are giving us a little indication that maybe things aren’t quite right. Here to talk to us about some particular things that we can listen to when our bodies are acting up is Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedics Specialists in Falmouth, Maine. Today’s diagnosis is Plantar Fasciitis. Dr. John?
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Dr. Lisa: As part of what your function is as the executive vice-president of the Maine Medical Association is to have a historical memory so that people don’t keep repeating the same mistakes that have been made in the past.
Gordon: It’s true and also listen to the members and see what they’re interested in today. A lot of my colleagues around the country haven’t adjusted well to the notion of employment for instance and how that changes the types of issues that we might work on. Thirty years ago, it was all about thought reform and scope of practice. That’s when doctors practice individually. They pay their own premium and all malpractice companies left the state in 1970s and people were bad. There was a crisis.
Now, we have the Second Life Premiums in New England after Vermont. We are in the quarter, the last of the 10 states in the country. We have a great system of pre-litigation screening panels. When we pull our members about what is bothering you about medicine today? What should the Maine Medical Association be working on thought reform isn’t there accepting if you ask OB-GYN which allow us to be a high risk specialty and neurosurgeons.
Our average member today is going to be a 40-year-old female pediatrician practicing maybe three days a week, who is likely to be as interested in BPA in children’s toys as she has scope of practice and thought reform. Also, the doctors today don’t agree on anything. It used to be you had these unifying issues. You take scope of practice. Many of the doctors want to expand their scope of practice of middle level practitioners because it will help them provide care. Still, you have a more traditional group of doctors that think, “You want to practice medicine, you go to medical school like I did in your completed residency,” that there’s no substitute for that.
It’s more difficult to find those unifying principles. Our view at the Maine Medical Association is it’s a big tent. We want to represent physicians in their training whether they’re in primary care, whether they’re in specialty care. We want to provide a menu of services and products that are appropriate that they need. That has obviously changed a great deal in the 30 year transformation that we’ve talked about from solo individual practice to people practicing many of them employed in a large system of care.
Dr. Lisa: I appreciate you’re spending the time with us to talk about the future of medicine and in some part, the past that you’ve seen yourself with medicine in the state of Maine. It strikes me that you are heading up what has to be a very flexible and open organization which is different I think than many people associated with the notion of medical associations.
Gordon: Let me say this. I think that we better be open minded about how we face issues. A good representation of where we are today, our new president, Dieter Kreckel up in Rumford is about my age. The chair of our board is Lisa Ryan. She’s an osteopathic physician. She’s the first osteopathic physician certainly who’s chaired our board. She’s what I would call a relatively young pediatrician. The chair of our legislative committee is going to be a young lady, Amy Madden who’s maybe three years out of her residency training.
We are going to have people from age 30 to age 80 involved in this organization and when people say, “Oh, it’s too liberal. It’s too conservative. You’re too Republican. You’re too Democratic or what.” The Maine Medical Association is what the members and those who choose serving leadership that are on the committees what they choose to make. If you want it to be something different than you think it is, then you get involved and then you get to make those decisions.
Dr. Lisa: It also strikes that when we talk about the Maine Medical Association that more and more of what’s happening is that you’re representing patient interest as well as physician and healthcare provider interests. I think this is an important thing for people who are listening to the show today to realize that you really are advocating on a number of different levels.
Gordon: Our mission is to advocate for physicians and their patients and to protect public health. Those are three different prongs that we put resources into each one. Again, I’m so proud when we asked our physician now through Survey Monkey, we can ask our members things every week. We continually try to listen to what is it that you’re interested in and the last really substantial polling that we did their interest was in getting their patients coverage. That was the thing that they responded was most bothersome in their practice was seeing people with poor insurance coverage public or private or no coverage. That’s not self-serving. That’s impressive.
Dr. Lisa: Gordon, how can people find out about the Maine Medical Association?
Gordon: We have a wonderful website at mainemed.com. it’s about to have a new website but it will have the same internet address. We’ve got sections there for patients, for providers. We revised it to make it more modern and to make it cleaner. Our consultants have told us, “You’ve got way too much content, thousands of pages of things.” We’ve tried to clean it up and tried to improve the indexing. Even I would go in and couldn’t find what I was looking. We’re excited about that. That will probably be unveiled in the next 30 days. The best way to learn about us is to go to the website or just call me up in our little office at Manchester, Maine. We’re listed right under the Maine Medical Association.
Dr. Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Gordon Smith who is the executive vice-president for the Maine Medical Association and a long-time friend of my family, my family of doctors. Thank you for all that you are doing for the physicians and other healthcare providers within the state of Maine and also for what you’ve done for the healthcare providers within my family.
Gordon: Thank you for your emphasis on wellness and complementary medicine. I think today, it’s not a matter we got to explode on an interview but doctors are far more willing now to acknowledge. They don’t know everything. They can’t help every patient and they’re much more willing to work in partnership with not only the patient but with people working outside of what we would consider traditional medicine. That’s going to be important in the future.
Speaker 1: A chronic ache, sleepless nights, a feeling of something being not quite right. You can treat the symptoms with traditional medications and feel better for a little while and continue on with your busy days. Have you ever stop to consider the what that’s at the core of a health issue? Most times it goes much deeper than you think. When you don’t treat the root cause, the aches, sleeplessness and that not quite right feeling come back but they don’t have to.
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Dr. Lisa: On the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour, we like to bring in guests who are thinking about things in new and different ways. One of our recent sponsors just came on was founded by somebody who we know is thinking about things in very new and different ways. Her name is Catherine Cloudman. She’s the co-founder of Apothecary by Design which we’re so appreciative of the sponsorship of our program. I’m also really appreciative of having the time to spend with you over several meetings because you’re doing very interesting things here in the state of Maine. Thank you for coming in.
Catherine: Thank you for having me.
Dr. Lisa: Let me start with what is Apothecary by design and where is it located, sort of the standard information.
Catherine: Sure. We’re located at 84 Marginal Way in the Intermed Building. We’re part of the bayside neighborhood which is sort of an up and coming neighborhood in Portland. We are an integrated pharmacy and when I say an integrated pharmacy, what I mean is that we have solutions that are integrated across pharmacy where we’ve got compounding, where we make prescriptions from the raw ingredients. We have a specialty pharmacy where we work with patients who have chronic complex diseases.
We have a regular retail pharmacy where we can help patients with their everyday medications. We have a nutritional health and wellbeing department where we talk to folks about alternative remedies to certain conditions and where supplementation might be appropriate to help manage side effects or nutrient depletions caused by any traditional medications that they’re on. We clinically support that with our pharmacist and nurses and patient coordinators who have some background in that area.
Dr. Lisa: You, yourself came from a very different background, not necessarily healthcare related. Tell me about that.
Catherine: That’s true. I have a business background and most of my work is at Apothecary by Design is centered around helping to manage the business side. I started a consulting firm a number of years ago called Cloudhawk Management Consultants and worked with closely held in family on businesses through New England on business valuations, strategic planning, succession planning and help those businesses pass from one generation to the next which was a fun thing to be a part of.
In my travels as a consultant, I came across a couple of folks who were the founders of Portland Professional Pharmacy which was a client of mine for a number of years. Back in early 2000s I helped them sell their business to a publicly traded company. I got to know their business really well as we worked on some of their strategic planning initiatives and really loved their business model and what they were trying to do and decided that that would be something I’d love to be a part of at some point.
I’d spent a lot of time helping businesses create value and grow their own business. I just thought at some point along the way that was something I wanted to do as well.
Dr. Lisa: Why is it important to you to be involved in something that’s may be challenging at times? The Apothecary by Design is seated firmly in the medical world. There’s a lot of transitions happening right now.
Catherine: Change has two sides of the coin. It can be very positive and it can be very disorienting for people. For us, I think we have the opportunity to take advantage of some things that are happening within healthcare that allow us to focus in on a more customized approach to helping people. I think that is sort of a wave that we will see happening here in the future. More personalized medicine, more of a focus on someone’s individual need and really caring for that individual in a very specific and unique way and in a very collaborative way with the other individuals that are helping that particular patient.
We do a lot of that at Apothecary by Design now. We work very collaboratively with the different practitioners that are helping our patients. We consider ourselves part of that healthcare team. I think that’s one of the many unique things about what we do. If you think about the pharmacy profession, a lot of these individuals, a lot of these pharmacists are spending a fair amount of time in school. They’re getting a very strong degree. Many of them are coming out of pharmacy school with options that maybe don’t meet what they envisioned as far as their professional career.
We really wanted to create an opportunity for people to have a very professional career path within pharmacy. I think we worked very closely with a number of the pharmacy schools to make that happen.
Dr. Lisa: I’ve met several of your pharmacist and I know that you are working to do a lot with education online and through social media. You have a nurse that works with you. It seems like this is something that they are being trained to do. Why do you think that pharmacists and nurses are underutilized by other pharmacies or other places in the healthcare system?
Catherine: I think some of it has to do if you think about the way pharmacy works today. The pharmacy industry has largely allowed itself to become a commoditized industry. We ran an ad when we first opened our business that said, “At what point did pharmacies go from being convenient to convenient stores that had pharmacies?” If you think about that and think about what it’s like to walk into many of the pharmacies that you might walk into, the pharmacy is tucked away in a little corner in the back and you rock down an aisle of sodas and snacks and maybe alcohol or cigarettes or something that probably has nothing to do with your health.
Then you make your way back to the pharmacy. At some point you may get a chance to talk to the pharmacist but they’re so busy and the criteria for which they’re being measured is so focused on quantity and output that they don’t really get enough time to interact with patients in a way that can impact how someone might take their medications very differently or to talk to them in a more in depth way about the side effects and how they might manage them and to really effectively advocate for that patient as they’re moving down their journey of time to tackle whatever health situation that they’re tackling.
These folks have gone to school to try and impact how someone is living their life. They view themselves rightly so as having the credentials to be able to do that. In our world, we really tried to create that opportunity. Even if it’s happening telephonically, there is a way to do that where you’re investing your energy in speaking with the patient proactively reaching out to the patient. We do compliance monitoring on our specialty patients depending on what disease state they’re in or we reach out to them on a monthly basis before their refills are due, speaking to them about how they are adhering to their medication protocol, what problems they might be having, what side effects they might need some help managing.
Prior that phone call, if it’s a transplant patient, we reach out to the transplant unit and have spoken with them about any dosage changes. We’re going into this phone call fairly knowledgeable about what needs to happen with this patient. We’ve built the rapport with that patient from the beginning probably from the time that they were discharged from the hospital. Our clinicians go up to the hospital at Maine Medical Center and they’re part of the discharge team. Counseling the patient about the medications that they’re on, helping the family determine what is going to be the right system for them to keep this patient compliant.
That’s a very different kind of model than what you see in a lot of other pharmacies. I think it’s a model that builds trust, builds a relationship and generate a higher adherence to their medication protocol.
Dr. Lisa: It sounds more like you’re actually in the empowerment business than you are in the pharmacy business in a way. You’re empowering the pharmacists to do their job better and you’re empowering patients and their families to comply to that higher level.
Catherine: I think that’s true. I think because we’re very focused on strong communication with the patient and with their practitioner, it’s a reinforcing model as well. If there’s something that’s not going quite right with that particular patient, we’re on the phone to the practitioner talking to them about what we’re seeing and what we’re hearing until that make sense for you to be making a phone call or is there something that we can do to try and get this back on track.
Dr. Lisa: Do practitioners seemed surprised by this level of involvement or do patients and their families ever seemed surprised?
Catherine: I think surprised in a good way. In some cases, yes, I think they’re very surprised. I think it’s actually particularly as we take in what I call this medication therapy management model within the specialty pharmacy area and have migrated to doing more aspects of that within retail pharmacy and within our compounding area. It’s something that I think practitioners and patients have gotten used to. They don’t expect that level of service when they’re going to many other places.
Practitioners kind of have to get a little used to someone advocating for their patient. I think now that we’ve been in business for four years and they see how that model is working and they know that they can trust us and they welcome the phone call. They know that the phone call is going to be a very relevant phone call. I think that’s an important piece. You have to build the trust in the relationship not just with the patient but also with the practitioner.
Dr. Lisa: Like me, you are a Maine girl; I mean, a woman now but you grew up in Gorham. You went to Gorham High School. I think you and I graduated around the same time and I won’t ouch you on how long ago that was but around the same time. You came back and you’re raising your family here. Maine is somehow important to you, why is that?
Catherine: Maine just is a very special place. I probably like you have spent some time living in other parts of the country or traveling around. I’m always kind of proud to say I’m from Main and chuckle a little bit when I’m at some place abroad and they say, “Where is Maine?” You say, “North of Boston.” It is a great place to have grown up. It’s a great place where you have a lot of people who I think have some common values. I’m very thrilled to be raising my children here.
I have a sister who lives in Maryland and works at the Pentagon and is commuting to and from work each day for an hour and raising three kids in that environment around the beltway. I’m really proud of everything she’s doing. It’s a lot harder to try and just get your life to work in that setting. I feel like we have been very fortunate to have established ourselves here and to be a part of this community that is so reinforcing to one another whether it’s our school community or where we live in South Portland or our community that we’re building down in the bayside area.
This is a community where people want other people to succeed. People want people to move to Maine because it’s a great place to live and it’s a great place to work. I think we’re all in general pretty proud of it and what it has to offer. I feel very fortunate to be here.
Dr. Lisa: Do you think that that has had any impact on why you’re doing the type of work with Apothecary by Design that you’re doing?
Catherine: Absolutely, both in terms of how I do my work, how our business has grown in some respect. For example, we opened our business four years ago and we worked with Bangor Savings Bank to do our financing originally. I had some relationships with some of the key people at Bangor Savings Bank prior to opening this business in my former consulting life. This was a group of people who were willing to bet on a startup, brand new, independent pharmacy in the face of all of the Rite Aids, Walgreens and CVS’s of the world because they believed in our model and they believed in the people who were behind the model.
Whether it’s Bangor Savings Bank or the relationship with our accounting firm or the relationship with our wholesaler, these are all people that we’ve known in our prior lives who believe in us and who believe our model can be successful. That has been very rewarding to see a lot of those relationships come back out of my paths and be able to tap into and utilize them into my future harkening back to the community concept.
One of the most rewarding things for me is just being out in the community and hearing about somebody having a good experience at Apothecary by Design. Sometimes I just get to overhear it. We were joking before about the exercise class. Occasionally, I’ll be at an exercise class and I’ll hear some people talking about Apothecary by Design. I think, “That is so neat,” that they are sharing their experience about this business that we’ve helped to build which is really fun for me.
When you get to hear about the success stories of something really working for a particular patient, whether it’s a specialty patient who was suffering from infertility and finally after going through their treatments has gotten pregnant and has sent us a thank you note or a bouquet of flowers. Those are really special moments that we cherish at our store.
Speaker 1: There was a time when the Apothecary was a place where you could get safe, reliable medicines carefully prepared by experienced professionals coupled with care and attention, focused on you and your unique health concerns. Apothecary by Design is built around the forgotten notion that you don’t just need your prescriptions filled, you need attention, advice and individualized care. Visit their website apothecarybydesign.com or drop by the store at 84 Marginal Way in Portland and experience pharmacy care the way it was meant to be.
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Dr. Lisa: It is interesting that you deliberately named the store, I call it a store although it’s a lot more than just a store but Apothecary. Why the word apothecary?
Catherine: Sure. It’s funny that you’ve asked that because there were probably a few people who advised us against using the name Apothecary because they said, “Geez, we’re not sure people are going to know what that is.” For us, what we wanted to illustrate both in our name and in how we do things is that we’re sort of a throwback to the old Soda Fountain Pharmacy that people do remember as their local apothecary. We are the modern day version of that with the modern day technologies and the cutting edge knowledge around both alternative therapies and pharmaceutical therapies that might be appropriate for people.
The name for us was important because it was distinctive from what you’re hearing. We didn’t want people to hear pharmacy. The image that flashes into people’s mind when they hear pharmacy are those aisles that I described before. They had lots of product that really don’t have anything to do with your health. That’s what people think of. They think of a big box retail store. They don’t think of a place that they go where they’re going to spend time learning about their health. Maybe grab a cup of coffee or tea and wander around the store and learn more about supplements that may be appropriate for them. That’s part of the reason why we chose apothecary. We really wanted it to be different.
Dr. Lisa: Apothecary also does offer educational programming. Talk to me about some of that.
Catherine: Sure. We have offered almost since we first opened a wide array of free educational programs that we typically with run on a monthly basis taking the summer off because we do live in Maine. They really very in terms of topic, as we talk before about collaborating and working with different practitioners, it was an outgrowth to that collaboration where we wanted to provide some educational opportunities for our patient. Also strengthen our partnership with different practitioners.
We’ve offered programs on autism, ADHD, women’s health related issues, infertility, just a wide range of topics that have really resonated with people. Typically, our speakers will come in and also do a presentation and then provide us with their presentation materials which we make available then on our website so that they live out there for a longer period of time and people can access that information.
We feel like that’s an important part of being a part of the community to provide those educational events. With our new space, I think we’ll have a chance to expand those opportunities to some extent. We also do some sponsorship of some different webinars that some of our practitioners are doing on their end so that we can help reach out to a larger audience out there as well.
Dr. Lisa: What have you learned personally in this process of founding this amazing organization and store but during a very significant economic problematic time?
Catherine: I’ve learned to be very patient both with myself and with others. I guess the most important thing and maybe this is in part age and maybe it is just life but I’ve learned to just accept the fact where one door closes, another one tends to open. Whether it’s an opportunity that we were really hoping might take some strategic initiative that we are really hoping was going to take hold that for whatever reason might not have panned out.
What I have found is that typically, something brighter and better comes along. Part of it is having your eyes open. Part of it is having enough irons in the fire that that can happen for you. Whatever it may be, it’s not allowing yourself to get too frustrated by the fact that those changes are going to happen and you have to be flexible enough to roll with the punches and be optimistic enough and believe in yourself and believe in your business that it’s all going to work out.
Dr. Lisa: I feel a little silly asking you this question that was so profound but back to knots and bolts, Apothecary by Design, how do people find out about your store?
Catherine: Our website is www.apothecarybydesign.com, that’s one way. We always welcome anybody coming in to talk with us and ask questions and we love to make ourselves available for that. We have a Facebook page that people can follow. We have a Twitter feed. We’ve got a lot of resources available on our website, educational resources, information about our past events, future speakers that might be coming up at the store. It’s a great wealth of information and also information about particular disease states that some people might be impacted on.
Dr. Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Catherine Cloudman who is the co-founder of Apothecary by Design here in Portland. We thank you for not only coming in and speaking with us today about this very important future of medicine topic but also being a resource for the community and for our listeners and for sponsoring our show because without people like you and people who are forward thinking, we wouldn’t be able to have this be possible.
Catherine: Thank you very much for having me. I really enjoyed it.
Dr. Lisa: You have been listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast show number 56, The Future of Medicine. Our guests today have included Executive Vice-President of the Maine Medical Association Gordon Smith and Co-founder of Apothecary by Design Catherine Cloudman. As you might imagine, our conversations with guests often go far beyond on what we can actually put on air. We encourage all of our listeners to go to our website doctorlisa.org and listen to the extended interviews because there’s a lot more wisdom to be found there.
Also, please take advantage of our podcast available through iTunes. All of our past shows are available for download for free. Be sure to like our Facebook page and send us a little note and let us know how you think that we’re doing through our website. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. Thank you for being part of our world. May you have a bountiful life.
Speaker 1: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcasr is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors: Maine Magazine, Mike LePage and Beth Franklin at Re/Max Heritage, Robin Hodgkin at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, Sea Bags, Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedics Specialists, Marci Booth of Booth Financial Services, UNE The University of New England, Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial, Apothecary by Design and The Body Architect.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is recorded in downtown Portland at the offices of Maine Magazine on 75 Market Street. It is produced by Kevin Thomas and Dr. Lisa Belisle. Audio production and original music by John C. McCain. For more information on our hosts, production team, Maine Magazine or any of the guests featured here today, visit us at doctorlisa.org. Download and become a podcast subscriber of Dr. Lisa Belisle through iTunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or Facebook page for details.