Now that they’ve spun off an offshoot of their business, local pharmacists Bill Walden and Jim Bauer plan to return their focus to their first love, Iola Pharmacy.
“You’ll get sick of seeing us,” quipped Walden Tuesday morning.
Dec. 20, Walden, Bauer and co-owner and pharmacist Travis Coffield sold Hospital Pharmacy Management to Avel eCare of Sioux Falls, S.D.
The Iola-based Hospital Pharmacy Management provided remote and in-person pharmacy services to primarily rural hospitals across Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri and Texas.
For Coffield, the sale means he will split his duties between Iola Pharmacy and Avel eCare Pharmacy, helping the latter develop an onsite pharmacy program.
Walden and Bauer, meanwhile, will serve as consultants to Avel eCare during the next six months of the transition, along with their responsibilities to Iola Pharmacy’s downtown location and its clinic at 1408 East St.
HPM provided pharmacy services to 53 primarily rural hospitals across Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri and Texas. Its staff included an additional 11 fulltime and three part-time pharmacists and two pharmacy technicians who worked both on site and remotely to fill and verify medication orders for hospital patients. All Hospital Pharmacy Management employees were absorbed into Avel eCare.
“They were offered identical positions with Avel,” Bauer said of the transition. “That was extremely important to us. Many of these employees have been with us since the beginning. We’ve become a family.”
According to Walden, he, Bauer and former partner Jeff Dieker, “fell into” establishing Hospital Pharmacy Management when they began providing services first at Allen County Hospital in 1993 and then with hospitals in Fredonia and Neodesha.
“This wasn’t our plan,” to grow into such an enterprise, Walden said jokingly.
It was 11 years ago that the business took off when in 2013 administrators with the Wichita-based Great Plains Health Alliance approached the Iola group to bid on providing telepharmacy services to hospitals there.
“We didn’t even know what remote, or virtual pharmacy work was,” joked Walden. “We learned very quickly.”
That contract included 14 hospitals, bringing HPM’s services wider recognition.
“In the last two years we went from 28 hospitals to 53,” Walden said. “Our trajectory was extremely high.”
So high, said Bauer, “that with our current organizational structure we would have had to make some significant changes,” if they were to continue the trend of managing hospitals’ pharmaceutical duties.
