Wysong’s latest ‘Tour of Duty’ is a triumph

For many, the Virginia Military Institute is a prelude to a rise through the officer ranks of the armed forces. Mike Wysong envisioned such a career for himself, but when he graduated from VMI in 1993, Desert Storm had ended, and he opted for a career in the drug distribution industry. He still proved his mettle, ascending the corporate ladder in sales for Baxter, Cardinal Health and AmerisourceBergen.

In 2010, Wysong’s leadership abilities brought him to the chief executive officer post at CARE Pharmacies, where he has guided the Linthicum, Md.-based cooperative’s growth from 45 members generating sales of $156 million to 170 members with cooperative sales approaching $2 billion.

“Every role I assumed prepared me for the next one,” he says. “They’ve all been good ‘tours of duty.’ ”A key lesson from his various tours was the importance of relationships and communication. Being in touch with member pharmacies has been critical to the success of CARE, he explains. “They’ll call and we’re quick to pick up the phone and talk to them and get a firsthand account of what the issue is. We have so many great relationships across so many different verticals that problem resolution gets to be easier for us. We’ve got relationships in the places that we need, whether it be with a wholesaler, a third-party plan, or a preferred partner.

“The same high-touch approach applies to CARE’s recruitment of new members, which typically entails a visit by Wysong. “I do a lot of the key customer development and relationship building. I love that. It goes all the way back to my old days being a sales rep. When I graduated from VMI, I was a salesman, and I loved getting in the car and going visiting with all my customers. Today, technology has limited the need for travel, but given the opportunity, I would much rather sit in front of you and shake your hand and talk about resolving the issues you have. It’s why I try to go to all the industry conferences and show up at all the meetings. I think an in-person connection is hard to beat.” 

Showing up, he adds, is a direct reflection of how you feel about the people you show up for. “When you take the time to get on an airplane for a visit, I think it’s representative of the fact that you were willing to take your most valuable asset, which is your time, and invest it in the future of a customer.

“Wysong has stretched out his time to serve the overall retail pharmacy sector as an active member of the National Association of Chain Drug Stores — which he chaired for the 2023-24 term — while heading CARE, and he describes the industry as at “a pivotal moment.” Given the prospects for PBM reform and an expanded scope of practice for pharmacists, he says, “no profession has the same capability as pharmacy to transform our healthcare system.” While this is “the most divisive time politically many of us have ever seen, I think pharmacy could play a really important role in terms of new models of care and reinstalling a collective pride across the healthcare system. My hope is to play a bigger and broader role by representing that possibility at CARE Pharmacies. We want to show what could be done on a much, much larger level when you have providers come together and work in good faith.”

CARE exemplified the capabilities of pharmacy during the pandemic. Just before its outset, Wysong chaired the February 2020 NACDS Regional Chain Conference (the last in-person event the association would hold for 30 months) and talked about facing uncertainty in the near term as an industry but didn’t specifically mention COVID-19 during his keynote address. A month later the shutdown began, and he says candidly he had no idea that it would persist long as it did. “But CARE had the infrastructure, and we signed up pretty quickly to be a player, and we were able to deploy in the places that we needed to — pretty quickly.” 

Noting that CARE was named Regional Drug Chain of the Year for 2021 by Chain Drug Review, he says the honor was “indicative of some of the things that we did not only just here in the state of Maryland, but in the other states that we were in.”

CARE was able to participate in both state and federal COVID vaccination efforts, effectively addressing the operational and logistical differences in each rollout. The company’s involvement with both NACDS and the National Community Pharmacists Association was a key factor in its success at responding on both levels.

The pandemic underscored the necessity for flexible and effective customer-centric care and coordination. The increased demand and workflow challenges that were placed on CARE’s pharmacies were significant, but they rose to the occasion and were able to meet patients’ testing and vaccination needs.

“Pharmacy stepped up when we needed it most,” Wysong says, adding that while government officials can have short memories, he strives to keep the industry’s accomplishments during the pandemic fresh in their minds. That was evident just last month, when he met Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz at the White House. Wysong discussed the need for PBM reform and provider status for pharmacists in the context of the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again movement.

While Wysong says he was acting on behalf of NACDS, the trip also gave him a chance to visit CARE pharmacies in Washington, D.C. “I get to be the hometown player when I go to D.C., because I have so many pharmacies in the district and Maryland.”Much of CARE’s success in 2021, and before and after, goes back to understanding where its uniqueness lay, he says. “If you’re serving HIV patients in underserved communities, that is the quintessential example of being a community-based provider and a high touch caregiver. Fifteen years ago was the beginning of the rise of specialty pharmacy, and I think we were smart enough to recognize that at that moment in time, and to embrace it.” 

As a 39-year-old new CEO at CARE in 2010, Wysong says he’s not sure he really understood the task before him with a company that was struggling a little to be profitable. But his focus on building relationships had turned the business around by 2012, when it had almost doubled in size and was named the sixth fastest growing retailer in the country by the National Retail Federation. It was a recognition that the cooperative would receive multiple times over the next 10 years.  That led to the bold — and what proved to be farsighted — decision to restructure the organization from a franchise to a cooperative, making the members, in essence, owners of the company.

Wysong says independent pharmacies are more oriented to being part of a retail buying group than being a franchisee. The infrastructure for a cooperative was 00there, he says, along with the recognition that pharmacies were better together than loosely affiliated. “I recognized that early and really tried to build on it. The concept was to take a retail independent based organization and drive more continuity across it, which I think sometimes independent pharmacy struggles with. Getting the benefit of that structure and making sure we personalized it with the end goal of serving customers well wound up being a great strategy.”

Being a cooperative “flattens out the organization so that there’s continuity between what we are being asked to do and why we are doing it, which is solely for the benefit of our member owners,” he says. “It lacks a complex infrastructure, which means the mission is very straightforward and we can scale effectively over time.”

Nothing reinforces behavior better than success, and “once you turn the corner and you have that pride, you have what I call ‘the swing,’” he adds. “You’ve got the swing like you know things are headed in the right direction. You’re winning games, and that attracts other high performers who want to be a part of that. It’s collective pride, which people see when you’re out and about.”

CARE has attracted “people with gifts in different places,” ranging from traditional pharmacies with front ends to “specialty light,” meaning mail order specialty pharmacies with licenses in 50 states, and even pharmacies offering rare orphan drugs. Pharmacies range in size from an HIV dispensary that’s a couple hundred square feet up to a 3,500-square-foot-plus conventional walk-in outlet. 

“If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen one,” says Wysong, and that “forces us to really cater to the individual needs of the provider. I love that challenge, because it forces us to really understand the complexities of each of those businesses and then tailor our solutions to meet those needs.”

Solutions now include artificial intelligence, health informatics and digital initiatives, which CARE is endeavoring to have its pharmacies take advantage of “without compromising their intimacy.” The company’s latest advances include an overhauled website with a digital pharmacy marketplace. “We’ve got a growing number of manufacturers and consumer product groups and other entities that have seen our visibility and status grow over the last 10, 15 years that want to partner with us because they like some of the things that we’re doing,” Wysong says. “And we’re trying to keep up with the demand. And adopting some of those technologies is really the only way we’re able to keep up because of how fast the business has scaled.”

Indispensable to Wysong’s ability to keep up throughout his career has been his wife Elisa, whom he met when she was participating in the Miss North Carolina beauty pageant while they were both in college. “My wife is way more talented than I am,” he says. “She is loyal, committed, and a hard worker. While I’ve been out growing CARE pharmacies and visiting with all of my constituents and colleagues, she raised our seven kids, kept the family and the house moving forward. I think it’s safe to say, “I may be her tour of duty — and no question, she’s a soldier.”

As Chair of NACDS He Was A Man in Motion 

Mike Wysong’s tenure as 2023-24 NACDS chairman gave new meaning to the role.

Besides speaking at conferences and the association’s RxImpact Day, he made it a point to meet with chain executives at their home offices, from Publix Super Markets in central Florida to Discount Drug Mart in Ohio and Lewis Drug in Sioux Falls, S.D. All told, he visited more than 20 states and 30 cities, connecting with government officials, consumer groups and health care stakeholders, as well as his retail counterparts. 

“One of the things that I learned on my visits was that there is really an interdependence between patients and providers, and communities and retailers, and it was really quite a gift to the spirit to see that,” he said at the time. “The other thing that I learned was that our association has a very strong identity and is really grounded in the responsibility to represent its members. There’s a faithfulness from the bottom of the association to the top to try to make sure it carries out the initiatives it thinks are important in terms of moving forward priorities on behalf of the member companies, and the other companies that are participants in and parties to the association.”

Reflecting on that time today, he said, “I look back at my chairmanship at NACDS with nothing but fondness. I learned a lot while I was out moving around. There is a real hunger for people to engage in new ways, to get together and look at what’s possible, not just what has been, but where there are areas for partnership.”

He made the most of one such possibility at CARE Pharmacies after meeting with representatives of AARP. They planted the idea of the cooperative getting involved with home caregiving, and it did just that. “We would have never gotten into that space if I hadn’t had that meeting,” he said.

His military background was much in evidence at NACDS. “The idea of esprit de corps and collective pride is pretty important to me — the idea that we are moving in a unified direction with a sense of resolve. Those are the underpinnings of how I view leadership.”

Even after passing on the chairman’s gavel, he has tried to be extremely visible within the industry to represent CARE and the overall pharmacy industry’s potential to enhance health care. 

From his vantage point a “refinement” of pharmacy is inevitable. “You’ll do more with less through some of the digital pieces. And automation and AI will help that. When you look at the declining enrollment at the pharmacy schools, you recognize that the business over a period of time is absolutely going to refine itself. At the same time, I don’t think you’ll ever get past a place where pharmacists are playing a critical role with patients or consumers. It’s just what role is that? I always say it’s paradoxical. I think what you’re likely going to see is a change in the scope of practice to embrace pharmacies’ capabilities and capacity; it will just be done in a more efficient way than the way it is delivered today.”

The front end, he maintains, will continue to have a place, even at a pharmacy-oriented company like CARE. “I think it’s going to continue to have importance for consumers. What you must remember is you don’t want to give people less reason to come into the stores. So, you have to be very attuned to what the consumer’s wants and needs are.”

At the same time, digital processes and informatics “are going to be very significant in terms of communicating and meeting new consumers where they want to be met.”