unknown 0:00

All right.

Timothy Zercher 0:00

Well, Jason, thank you so much for joining. We're really excited to talk today. Thanks, Tim. I appreciate you welcoming to your show. Absolutely. So you've worked across finance operations and now obviously as a CEO. What first drew you into healthcare and behavioral health more specifically?

Jason Dana Costa 0:16

Well, I've always been a nonprofit professional, around 30 years or so, and I've always been wanting to do meaningful work. And the first half of my career, well, believe it or not, was with historical societies. I did a lot with believe or not, historic whaling and historic architecture here. I'm in New England. So those things are particularly historic architecture. The whales are out in the water. But I ended up working in Boston after spending some time away in the mid-Atlantic and landed with a type 1 diabetes research organizations, a lot of universities and startups there in the Cambridge-Boston area. It was just really cool to be part of something innovative and exciting that different than historical societies, you're improving lives immediately. Where historical societies you were using the past to give you reference to the future. When I had the opportunity to work with behavioral health, type 1 diabetes and substance use, the care was immediately you're right in front of the person, impacting their lives in a meaningful way. So that's the kind of work I wanted to do.

Timothy Zercher 1:14

That's awesome. So, like you said, I mean your work connects pharmacy, behavioral health, and kind of the nonprofit impact. Where do you think leaders still underestimate the role of medication management in overall patient outcomes?

Jason Dana Costa 1:27

A lot of things on the political scale right now talk about the cost of pharmacy, and they're not wrong. It's constantly escalating. But medication management in and of itself is the right dose, the right time, the right medication for the person. And people would be so much improved. Their outcomes would be improved if in fact they were able to do that. If they take those things at the right time, their health outcomes significantly improve. And we'd even save some money on the outcomes of what we're doing with the costs here. If you're able to get the person doing that. So achieving that sort of right, right dose, right time, takes some teamwork, particularly with behavioral health and substance use. Our packaging is actually color-coded. So, like you learned your colors when you were a child. So yellow's morning, blue is night, white is the afternoon. And when you're cognitively impaired, being able to take it at the right time makes sure that person is well. And we collaborate with organizations to provide those packaged medications to help those individuals. And when they get well by taking the right medication at the right time, they don't end up in hospitals. They don't end up in other places that cost the whole system significantly. If you can avoid hospitalization, there's a significant reduction in costs. And there's oftentimes people end up in hospitals because they didn't take the medication at the right time. I can't begin to tell you how much I know what impacts the outcomes. Horizon Pharmacy partners with a self-insurance program for our organizational owners. And I can see the direct impact of about a thousand people utilizing their pharmacy benefit in them in a far more unique way through our program.

Timothy Zercher 3:01

It makes complete sense. And I think it drills home, I mean, beyond the cost, right? The cost in human impact and personal lives that can be sometimes saved and other times just saved a lot of heartache of having to be admitted to a hospital and having to go through whatever. It makes complete sense and makes the argument very well.

Jason Dana Costa 3:19

You'd be surprised if you went to a hospital's ER on a Friday or Saturday night, how many people there are really actually there, not because they were in a car accident or broke their leg or something like that. There's a tremendous number of people there that are behavioral health individuals that just are in crisis. And if they had the right medication, making it up for a minute, if they were bipolar or schizophrenia, they wouldn't even be there. And they're there because it's kind of like a holding place until they can even find a crisis bed because the beds are a capacity. We can't fill enough beds. So that is where they end up. And if we can avoid it, it has a significant amount of cost. These are not the right use of an emergency service space for those sort of interactions.

Timothy Zercher 4:01

Absolutely. So you've led organizations through growth and transformation multiple times. What have you learned about building systems that are both financially sustainable and also mission-driven?

Jason Dana Costa 4:12

Well, I spend most of my career in technical training as a CFO and COO. So we kind of come with this invisible assumption that most people look at CFOs and go, well, it's not in the budget. No, that's the base reaction most people are expecting. One of the ways that I changed how that was happening for me is I sort of became what I like to call as maybe Dr. Maybe. I wanted to learn why people are asking for the thing that they're looking for. Now, of course, as I said, I worked for nonprofit organizations. These are mission-based organizations that really sometimes from the outside, people think that they're not necessarily well fiscally run, which I think is a fallacy that needs to be broken, because money equals mission. If you're able to do the right thing and have the money, you're able to fulfill your mission. And what I really spent a lot of time in my career is being inquisitive, asking the questions, why do you want to do that? How is that relating to the mission? Because a lot of time the answer is not no. It might be just maybe and not yet, because there's some reason that was happening within the fiscal parts of the company. It's my responsibility to look at those concerns, acknowledge what that person's looking for. And while sometimes it may be no at that particular moment, oftentimes it was, you know, not yet. Okay, what can we do there? Because that is both fulfilling the mission for the lock of the people who work for nonprofits. We don't go to nonprofit work expecting to be fidelity rich. I'm a smart finance guy. I could have gone that route, but I wanted to feel fulfilled personally and give back to my community. It says it right above my head there. It says, You're a pharmacy, our community. It matters. You try to try to do work that is impacting your community and sometimes takes a little while to get there. And you got to think of different strategies on how to get there. And you got to bring those people in that you're working with to make sure that you as a leader are conveying that you're hearing their concerns because they clearly think this is the right thing for the organization and the right thing for the mission, but it may not be today. So you got to kind of get on the same side of that table with them, understand what their needs are, because you're balancing, as at least as a CFO for most of my career, the fiscal health of the organization as well as achieving the mission. You got to test every interaction that you're doing there so that make sure that it builds trust with the organization, meets the mission, but then guides it in a fiscally responsible way. And that has really translated even to being a CEO. In some respects, it's even more exacerbated as a CEO because the mission is you have to embody where the organization is going. Actually, kind of stops here. It's one of the more both exciting and disconcerting things to have made that shift personally, professionally, where I had a role, I had a part to play. Now it's really who am I going to go ask? Me and oh, by the way, me. What are we going to do in doing that? Which also still has collaboration with the organizations, but ultimately I'm the guy who has to make some of the hard decisions.

Timothy Zercher 7:10

100%. I think the hardest part about being in charge is that the responsibility is all you, right? I think in a way, that's what you just said, right? I think that is what everyone realizes when you're working inside of an organization. You have a million ways that you would do it better and you could make a better decision. And man, those guys up top just have no idea what's going on. And then you're up top, and I don't have any idea what's going on. And it's too bad because I'm the one that has to make the call. And it's not unfortunate sometimes.

Jason Dana Costa 7:33

Yeah, and really it even exists in an organization as small as mine. I've only got 30 or some odd people here, but yet it's still true. And I was just doing a new hire orientation with one of our employees. I choose to do that with every new hire that we have here. And she was like, Oh, that's really great. Large organizations, they don't even think that way. I'm like, oh no, they do, they just don't have the opportunity to let it kind of get down to the level with everybody doing it. But I assure you, those leaders are doing it. I've run organizations with 500 employees, I've run organizations with five employees, and your mental state doesn't change, but your ability to convey it and get the collaboration is just really process driven.

Timothy Zercher 8:09

Absolutely. So shifting gears a little bit, since we're a marketing agency that specializes in the comprehensive healthcare space, we always ask some marketing type questions. First one is outside of word of mouth, what's working best for you right now in terms of acquiring clients?

Jason Dana Costa 8:23

Well, it depends what you mean by word of mouth. I do do a lot of conference attending and I do a lot of board work. And when I mean conference, it's not necessarily just local conferences. Of course, we do them here on Rhode Island where we're situated, but I do go to national conferences as well. And then I do a lot of boards. So more organization I did a process with recently is called Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses, which is a conglomerate that brings a lot of disparate type of organizations, usually 10 employees or less, to share and grow their skills and building their profession. But honestly, one of the best out of that has really been networking with different organizations within the state of Rhode Island and making connections because it's got to be six or seven hundred assisted living facilities just in this state here alone. And you can't make every relationship immediately with a cold call or a cold email. And really hearing about some of those challenges that those organizations have made connections for me, as well as conferences, even on the national level, because a lot of us come from the state of Rhode Island and go there. One of the unique things about pharmacy is you really are walled gardens, at least here in the Northeast. You have to be licensed and you have to do all your business within the state confines. Though our goal is actually to extend into Rhode Island, from Rhode Island into Massachusetts and into Connecticut, hopefully soon. And how I intend to acquire those will be some, you know, direct relationships. I'm going to try to use our board relationships, try to use those local conference relationships to try to connect with a closed-door pharmacy because it's not the same. It's not like I can go to a B2C sort of model. You have to be a facility. So it's a B2B model and it's a very regulated relationship, you know, sort of area. So a lot of trust work has to be done. Even though I'm not a pharmacist, I have to bring a pharmacist with me. I can open doors, she closes them because it's those relationships with those nurses and medical directors that really seal the deal with the trust.

Timothy Zercher 10:23

Yeah, yeah. Because at the end of the day, what they're really buying is your pharmacist's experience and intelligence and processes. That makes complete sense. So what is one marketing tactic that you are either considering for your team or just watching really carefully in the marketplace? Outside of relationships, because I know that is the primary driver right now.

Jason Dana Costa 10:42

Well, you know, we're not going to benefit from a lot of SEO and website type stuff, but I do think social media and blogs, though they are tried and tested and been around, is a new thing for us and gets us out there. So I try to do, for example, I can't even show you a copy of it if you're interested. We were recently on the cover of 20 Ways, which is a industry rag for long-term care pharmacies. Around 35,000 pharmacies receive it. So we did a couple of bylines in there for between myself and my partner, pharmacist. She was on the cover. I'm not a pharmacist, so I don't belong on the cover, but she does. Trying to make some thought leadership postings, particularly in LinkedIn. I think that's a good avenue for us because we're a B2B business. So trying to develop those opportunities. And even trying to use our thought leadership to engage, say, PR firms that have opportunities to say place a byline in, say, a Forbes or a Wall Street Journal, things like that. I think those kind of strategic placements about the long-term care pharmacy world is really important and will raise our profile. And then ultimately I will bring business to us because like many people don't even realize when they think pharmacy, they think CVS or Walgreens. They don't realize that there is wholesale pharmacies, there's long-term care pharmacies, there's compounding pharmacies. Even hospital pharmacies are different than what we are. Those kind of licenses are completely different. And getting out there with opportunities to provide explanations about what makes this business model unique and important, I think, is particularly critical in what they call LTC at home, because the assisted living and skilled nursing models are fracturing, if not breaking. Many people want to age in place. They'd rather age at home and being to provide a packaged medication solution to individuals. And for those that are listening and don't know what a package medication solution is, you have a grandmother, you have a mother, and they have that little strip that says Saturday to Sunday with the little yellow flip it up. You drop it into those things so they take it at the right time, the right day, the right dose. What LTC pharmacies like I do is they package that week reminder for everybody for like a month. And doing it in either a strip packaging format, which is sort of like you pull like a tape measure or a cloth or comes out in the order you need it, or it's in cards that have 28-day bubbles with the right medication. That's what we do. So for you listeners who don't understand what that is, that's what a long-term care pharmacy does, is it packages the medication and the directions specifically in a way to help the individual take the right medication the right time at the right dose. Our unique model has it even color-coded to help people to that. And not many people really understand it's out there and oftentimes don't even engage it until uh crisis. And this is available to people, I think, earlier than a lot of people know. And I think educational bylines and PR is going to be a great methodology for us to get there. And we've just begun tickle-doing it the last year or so.

Timothy Zercher 13:52

So that makes sense. That makes sense. And I think I think that's a good strategy. I think the trick is getting in front of the right people in your business and not just everybody. It's a challenge we've helped a lot of clients with, but it's not an easy one ever, because you don't care about 100% of the population. You care about 0.5% of the population or even less, right? Probably like 0.1% of the population facility decision maker.

Jason Dana Costa 14:12

Population is aging fast. You know, true.

Timothy Zercher 14:14

It's becoming a larger and larger percentage, but people are at that age.

Jason Dana Costa 14:17

The generation boomers are hitting the age where this sort of medication management is probably appropriate. And great news is they are wealthy enough at this point that going into nursing homes is not necessarily a requirement. They're not that infirmed. So LEC at home, you know, with maybe a visiting nurse who comes by once a month or once a week with a package medication support is exactly what they could do and increase that longevity and go, oh, yeah, save costs by not having them hit the hospital, by not taking their statin as an example on time when they're supposed to.

Timothy Zercher 14:49

Absolutely. Perfect. Well, thank you so much, Jason. We really appreciate you taking time. I think you're making a lot of impact for a lot of lives. So thank you for coming on. And I think actually educating our audience a little bit because I do think a lot of people in our space are not fully aware of the options that are out there. So I appreciate it. Hi, thank you so much, Tim, for inviting me. I appreciate the time and the promotion you're providing us. Absolutely.