Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: And good afternoon, everyone. I'm Philip Clark, and I'm the CEO, executive director of. Just say something. Here in Greenville, South Carolina.
And this morning, we had a press conference announcing the power collective. And you asked, what's the power collective?
It's an opportunity for us to work in our community with our partners, Greenville County Sheriff's Office, rise prevention and Safe Rx, to raise the awareness of the issue surrounding opioid and fentanyl overdoses in our community. Because, unfortunately, Greenville leads the other counties in South Carolina with the highest number of deaths due to overdose.
And so we collectively applied for money through the South Carolina Opioid Recovery Fund and were granted our project. And so with this and our creative and the efforts that we have here, we developed the power collective. And so this problem in our community is larger than any one organization.
And so we've joined forces, and our goal is to bring others in as we continue to grow this and make our community aware of the prevention and the activities we have coming up. And so today is a special honor for me and for us because we are joined by Milton Cohen from Denver, Colorado. And Milton is the CEO of Saferx. And Saferx is a key partner with the power collective.
So, Milton, welcome to Greenville.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:02:19] Speaker A: And could you tell us a little bit about yourself?
[00:02:23] Speaker B: Yeah. Terrific. Well, Phil, thanks very much for being here. Thanks for being such a great partner in the collective. We're very, very fortunate to be part of the solution here in your community. So thank you for that.
In terms of myself, I'm a father of a teenage daughter.
I have a personal story. Like many others in my extended family around the opioid epidemic. And so, like many others, when I encountered this bottle, which was invented by a practicing anesthesiologist, I knew that I had to go commercialize it and bring the solution out to all of our communities here in the country. And so it's been an honor to be able to do that and to have been in the right place at the right time to be able to bring the right solution on the prevention side. So it's been an honor.
[00:03:18] Speaker A: Awesome. So you are in Denver, Colorado. So is that home for you?
[00:03:26] Speaker B: Yeah. So I'm based in Denver. Our company is based in Denver. We're actually about 15 minutes south of town in an area called Greenwood Village. Well, 15 minutes with no traffic, probably about 45 with traffic.
But, yeah, we've been there since inception, and it's been a great place to build a company. Great labor force, lots of things to do in Denver, and we've been successful there. And we're a part of the prevention community in Colorado, too, as you might expect. And so Denver's home, but home is where the heart is, and our heart is with all the communities out there that are suffering from the epidemic.
[00:04:04] Speaker A: Okay, so tell us a little bit about the impact that safe Rx has had within your community.
[00:04:13] Speaker B: Yeah, super. Well, like I said, I consider our community to be the country.
We've got bottles now in all 50 states.
We've got programs that range from programs like the power collective here in South Carolina, where groups come together to distribute vials in the community all the way through to larger dispensing customers. And by dispensing, what I mean by that is pharmacies filling prescriptions in our vials behind the counter or in a clinical setting or an institutional setting, not necessarily retail. And so we've got a range of different types of solutions that are used by all of our partners nationwide. And one of the things that's super important to us in terms of the business and our people and culture is mission. We have a high degree of mission intensity. I have a personal story in my extended family.
Most to all of our people know someone that's been affected, whether it's a friend, a family member, a neighbor, extended family, or friends of their children, grown children, and young children alike.
And so that mission intensity is something that we track data on.
We had our impact model third party validated last year by a great drug safety and toxicology firm. And with our partners, now that we've had that third party validated, can go out into our communities with the folks like you and others and actually say, this is the impact that we're having. And it's super important to be able to do that, because you need to track the impact. You got to be able to demonstrate the value.
[00:06:03] Speaker A: Well, prevention is one of those things that people are like. So prove that your prevention efforts are making a difference in your community. And so those of us in the prevention field, especially a small community based organization like what we are, we don't really have the dollars to be able to do something like that because that's not a cheap effort.
And so with some of the work that you've done with other communities, what does that collective impact or that tangible piece look like when it comes to this type of movement within a community?
[00:06:51] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. So we track data on a lot of different things, from the number of pills that have been secured to the number of pilfering events that we've prevented. And by pilfering I just mean sneaking a few pills out of the bottle without anybody knowing, which is a leading source of diversion here in the country to heroin transitions, fatalities. We track a lot of public health measures, but we also track a lot of economic impact measures on a dollar basis in the community. We track the excess health care costs. We've saved that community. We track the uncompensated care that our providers bear in those communities for uninsured patients that they treat with opioid use disorder. And so there are a lot of different measures that we use, and some are more important than others when there are specific grant program requirements. And so we usually, on a very collaborative and consultative basis, sit with our customers and partners in those communities, define what's important to them, and enable them to report on those impact numbers to their grand tours and also externally in their community.
[00:08:13] Speaker A: Well, and I know we had dinner last night, and you were showing me and one of our other partners rise prevention in this effort, part of what the impact would be for Greenville county if we were able to provide 40,000 free bottles to our community.
And so it was astounding.
And so, as I think about that, you think of 40,000 bottles in a community the size of Greenville county, that seems like a lot, but at the end of the day, it's just a small bucket of our population.
But then that impact piece that I believe, if I'm right, was right, just over $29 million in impact, economic impact for us. And I was floored.
[00:09:33] Speaker B: Yeah, the data is very compelling. The opioid epidemic has cost this country tremendously. Not only loss of life, but also our economy.
The measures that we track include not only the excess health care costs in the system for treatment, which are substantial, but they also track the expense to a criminal justice system where we have a lot of folks going into incarceration that may be better served by going into treatment, or at least incorporate the treatment into their time.
So criminal justice expense, lost productivity in the workforce, is a big contributor. The opioid epidemic has impacted business in this country significantly. I think large employers are starting to take note because they bear the expense in their self insured plans.
And then you've also got the cost of fatality. And so we generally show it with and without the cost of fatality to many of our potential payers that might reimburse for this when we're out there talking with them, because the other costs are much more tangible, particularly the excess health care cost to them. So depending on the audience, any one or more of those measures may matter more than the other.
[00:10:52] Speaker A: Right.
[00:10:52] Speaker B: But here in Greenville, the economic impact is going to be substantial. I think we showed it to you over a year, two years, and three years at 40,000 a year. And those make a very big difference.
Every household you impact is 3.13 people on average nationally that you're impacting.
[00:11:11] Speaker A: So if I'm a businessman, whether I have five employees or I have thousands of employees, what is something that I can do as that business owner, to say, hey, I know my community is suffering. What can I, as a businessman, do to get involved with?
[00:11:41] Speaker B: Well, I think, you know, for business, I'd answer that maybe two ways, Philip, and this is one man's opinion, one person's know. You may ask different business people, and they may have different answers for know the cost. So let's just take your smaller organization. Your smaller organization is typically going to have a group plan with a larger insurer. And there's not much to do there, except to provide as part of your wellness program. If you do have that type of program internally, where you're providing additional benefits outside of the health plan itself, you can provide bottles to your employees, educate them, particularly those with households with multiple members or people that might be in shared living situations. You want to make sure that people know the importance of keeping their medication secure, because when it comes from the pharmacy, it really doesn't tell you to be aware of the risks of diversion. There's nothing in there that suggests that somebody might want to be stealing those pills and otherwise. And so you really just want to be building awareness with the workforce. When you flip over to your larger employers, it's generally around, I think, 200 or 300 employees or more that that class of employer moves to a self insured plan as opposed to an off the shelf group plan. And in those circumstances, it's really more of our employers are becoming attuned to the true world math on this. And that is, the earlier you intervene in a disease horizon, and addiction is just that, a disease horizon. The earlier you intervene, the lower the costs and the higher the impact. And the later you intervene, higher the cost, lower the impact, because you'll just end up with frequent flyers that continue to utilize very expensive healthcare resources. And so our larger employers can really move in plan design to invest more, ultimately less, because of their savings on the back end, but to invest more in prevention so that they can avoid the very high costs of treatment among the employees and their families that they cover.
[00:14:02] Speaker A: Right.
[00:14:03] Speaker B: So I hope that answers your question on business.
[00:14:08] Speaker A: And I know one of the things that caught me off guard this morning when you were speaking as part of the press conference, and if you could tell our listeners a little bit about this is the child protective caps, of course, medicine bottles. I'm like, I didn't think about that. But that's such a close relationship between that and what we're able to do with these safe Rx bottles.
[00:14:35] Speaker B: Yeah. So, Phil, I'm so glad you asked that. It's such a great question.
It was one of the reasons that really compelled me to come commercialize this in the first place, because I do think from just a societal policy of regulatory and many other perspectives, we've been truly negligent.
And all of us, until the LPV came around, really overlooked these child resistant vials because they're a proven intervention in access control. But it's been hiding in plain sight right under our noses because it's so long ago that we did that, that everybody's forgotten the impact. And so what happened there? This is a great story, actually.
Here in the US, we had a massive child overdose epidemic on aspirin. And you might scratch your head and say, aspirin? Well, yeah, you can overdose on aspirin. The story is it's bitter to the taste, naturally, so kids wouldn't take it. And back then, the prescription of the day, any doctor visit, was take to aspirin and call me in the morning. Right.
[00:15:44] Speaker A: I remember those days.
[00:15:45] Speaker B: That's right.
So what happened is the mothers complained that the kids wouldn't take it. Doctors passed it along to the manufacturers, and the manufacturers, in turn, flavored it like candy. And as soon as they flavored it like candy, you can bet anything I.
[00:16:01] Speaker A: Remember the orange bears.
[00:16:02] Speaker B: That's what I grew up on. Yeah. And there's certainly a time when I took too many of those and my mom grabbed them out of my hand because they did taste like candy. They were great. They kind of melted in your mouth. I mean, I can remember them. I could smell them, Phil, now that we're talking about it.
But what happened then was we had this massive overdose epidemic from kids overdosing on flavored baby aspirin. Congress acted in 1970, they passed what's called the Poison Prevention Packaging act, which established the special packaging standards that include both a child resistant test and also a senior friendliness test. Right. Because in addition to keeping kids out, you got to make sure that older people can open them.
[00:16:42] Speaker A: Right, right.
[00:16:43] Speaker B: And so fast forward, in retrospective studies that were done, this is one of the first interventions in access control. Right. They found that there was a 45% reduction in us child mortality from drug and supplement poisonings as a direct result of that intervention. Super simple.
[00:17:02] Speaker A: And that intervention is a child protective lock on a prescription bottle.
[00:17:07] Speaker B: Yes. A child resistant cap enclosure. Something so simple and so effective and so inexpensive.
[00:17:16] Speaker A: Right.
And so we fast forward to 2024. And in my mind, these bottles that are lockable is the child protective.
I hate to use this analogy, but on steroids, it's taken it to the next level. Can you show, I certainly can. Some of the, or what the bottles look like? Sure.
[00:17:49] Speaker B: That's a 60 grams bottle. It's labeled there with the power collective partnership brand. So you guys can all see that. And around the top of the cap, you can see those gray dials. Those have numbers zero through nine on them. And when you rotate them around and line up the pin number correctly on the pin alignment axis here, then you can just take the top off very easily.
Four digits is 10,000 combinations. It's also what most consumers are used to with their preferred pin numbers.
We leave it up to the pharmacy, but the way this works at the pharmacy, it used to give you an idea, and I'll show you how this open and closes. The way this works at the pharmacies, I'll describe a typical retail setting.
Sorry about that.
[00:18:41] Speaker A: No, that's fine.
[00:18:42] Speaker B: Typical retail setting. You drop your script off, pharmacy will ask you what you want your pin number to be. They store that pin in the system, in the patient notes field, and then whenever you have a fill that's in their LPV program. LPV is just our name for locking prescription vial.
[00:18:58] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:18:58] Speaker B: Whenever you have a fill that's in the LPV program, they'll pull a cap out, they'll encode it with your pin number right out of the system, and then basically cap the fill, scramble the lock, put it in your bag, and it's waiting for you right at pickup, just like a normal prescription.
[00:19:17] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:19:18] Speaker B: So it's very minimally disruptive to workflow. There is some incremental time behind the counter, but we're getting pharmacies reimbursed for this by the payers. We already have two states committed to do it for Medicaid coverage.
And then as plan sponsors come on board and state employee self insured plans come on. Know. More and more of the fills that cross the counter will come more and more. Your controlled fills that cross the counter will come in one of these.
[00:19:48] Speaker A: Right?
[00:19:49] Speaker B: As opposed to one of the older ones that any six year old can open.
[00:19:53] Speaker A: I don't guess South Carolina is one of those two states.
[00:19:56] Speaker B: No.
[00:19:57] Speaker A: Is it?
[00:19:57] Speaker B: No.
[00:19:58] Speaker A: I'm sorry to, you know, thought I'd put that out there. You never know. Yeah.
This partnership is amazing.
I'm so appreciative that just say something is part of this. And I'm so appreciative that you took the time to come here for our press conference today just to change the mood a little bit about our conversation.
So, what do you think of Greenville?
[00:20:34] Speaker B: I love Greenville.
I think I was telling you at dinner last night, I used to drive up 85 to get from my home in New Orleans, which is where I grew up, up to college in the northeast. And I would always stop in Greenville for gas. And back then, this is a little bit while ago, I would get these bags of pecans or ham, and they would sell those at the gas stations. And it was wonderful because I got to all this fresh stuff that I could take back to school or take back home to my mom, who probably appreciated it more than my college roommates. Right.
And so it's a really nice place. But fast forward to today. Philip, it's such a pleasure to be here, because I mentioned this earlier when I was here with a larger group that, Greenville, you have a phenomenal community here. And by community, I don't mean that gorgeous downtown that you have, or the great outdoor space or the Renaissance that is very clear and vibrant in the community here. But what I mean is the sense of community among all of the organizations here, working together as a community, among themselves, for the community, for the impact they can have together, working together in the community. And that sense of community is really inspiring. I think if other metro areas in the country could follow Greenville's example on know, we could lick this thing a lot.
So, you know, it was really inspiring to be here and to be part of know to have been invited by you all into this community with our solution.
We're grateful for that. So, thank you.
[00:22:23] Speaker A: Well, thank you. And like I said earlier, this problem is bigger than one entity, and so it's incumbent upon us all to do what we can for those in our community.
I would be willing to bet there's not a family out there. Greenville CouNTy is no different than a county or area in OHiO or Colorado or anywhere else.
If you're honest with yourself, you have either a family member, a coworker, or a friend who's been affected by substance use disorder, addiction, whatever you want to call it, and overdose.
And we are just in the beginning stages of doing what we can collectively for our community, a lot more needs to be done, but this is a great start.
And so with that, again, I want to thank you for being here with us today, and I hope you'll come back soon. I hope we don't have to have a press conference to get you back here, but I'm excited about our partnership, and I look forward to working with you and your team as we get this power collective off the ground and running for our community.
[00:24:03] Speaker B: Well, thank you very much for having me. It's great to be here, and it won't take a press conference to get me back.
I miss the south, and the Greenville food is very close to what I used to have growing up in New Orleans. And so I enjoyed breaking bread with you and Martine last night. And so I'm hopeful that you'll have me back and we can do that again over some good Greenville new southern food.
[00:24:31] Speaker A: The invitation is always open, and as you shared last night, there's a direct flight between Denver and, you know, no excuses.
[00:24:40] Speaker B: Easy peasy.
[00:24:40] Speaker A: Yeah, that's. That's right. Right.
[00:24:42] Speaker B: Thank you very much so much for.
[00:24:44] Speaker A: Being here with us.
[00:24:45] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:24:45] Speaker A: And for your partnership and for your support.
[00:24:48] Speaker B: Thank you. It's great to be a part of it.
[00:24:50] Speaker A: And that concludes this session of just say somethings podcast. And so join us next week. We'll have another topic, and we'll see you soon. Thanks again.
