In month two of my time at Alchemy, I was most excited to visit some of our customers in the field. It wasn’t just about learning how they use our products and platforms, and which buttons and screens they love or hate, but it was about hearing about their clinical and pharmacy ambitions regardless of their stage or maturity.
So, last week I finally spent time with four covered entities we’re proud to call customers and partners. They serve similar communities and share many of the same pressures, but each sits at a different point in its growth. Seeing them back to back made one thing clear: the right tools and the systems you need depend on where you are in your growth, not just what you do.
Stage 1: Building up your pharmacy muscle
The first CE I spent time with is in build mode. Its patient panel has grown fast, and the team is launching a full-service, in-house pharmacy while enrolling many patients in insurance for the first time. They were bringing on a new pharmacist a few weeks before their launch to ensure they were ready to dispense on day 1 and luckily he’d worked at another Alchemy-supported pharmacy in the past.
Most patients rely on manufacturer assistance programs today in part to afford their prescriptions. The questions at this stage are foundational. Which plans protect patients from high deductibles? How does 340B fit? Should patients whose housing changes often get delivery or pick up at the clinic?
They are also preparing for new state rules that let pharmacists prescribe PrEP. Their vision: an outreach worker tests someone in the community, a pharmacist can prescribe on the spot, and the patient picks up from the clinic's own pharmacy.
Where Alchemy helps:
- Our Insurance Enrollment enables pharmacies and clinics to sign up patients for new coverage/
- Our Delivery Modes flex to each patient. That means mail order, local courier that runs with batched routes and photo confirmation, or clinic pickup for patients who prefer it
- We often recruit full-time pharmacists to new locations who have trained at an existing pharmacy, either on weekends or when staff call out sick, which means even new pharmacists have deep grasp of how an Alchemy-built pharmacy runs and operates
Stage 2: Scaling outreach
The second CE I spent time with runs one of the most ambitious testing programs I've seen: housing complexes, outdoor fairs, and even overnight events. Every test feeds several reporting systems at the county and federal level, and each county asks for different fields.
At this stage, the bottleneck to doing testing well is operations, not commitment. Their suggested approach is smart: build a separate intake form for each county and rehearse the full event flow with test patients before going live. After all, field testing is challenging because the circumstances (internet, weather, physical limitations, security) create unforeseen issues that need a plan B. And beyond testing protocols, plans, and mechanisms, they shared that expanding their testing program means finding and retaining even more community health workers who can thrive in dynamic environments and build bridges from traditional healthcare to high-need populations.
Where Alchemy helps:
- Our Community Testing product handles public QR-code intake and results tracking in the field. An upcoming dynamic form builder will let teams create county-specific forms, SDOH surveys, and other intake variants on their own, with the click of a button.
Stage 3: Widening the circle of care
The third CE already tests in-clinic and at weekend events, and wants to expand its testing efforts beyond STIs and HIV to encompass even more common chronic conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure. This team’s thinking has been informed by a vision to treat patients across their entire life. One idea that they shared with us that encompasses their ambitions most broadly: if a courier is already delivering medication, why not enable food, clothing, and wellness kits to be included too based on existing risk criteria and patient needs? Beyond screenings and extensive social services, they shared that they apply for a new grant almost every month, which takes real staff time.
Where Alchemy helps:
- Our Medication Adherence Dashboard measures each patient against clinical targets, 80% of days covered for most drugs and 90% for HIV.
- We're also experimenting with a Grant Digest that matches open opportunities to each CE by state, strategy, and eligibility.
Stage 4: Running a mature pharmacy
The fourth CE runs a well-established in-house pharmacy, and its daily routine is a model of discipline. Mornings start with the clinic schedule: who's coming in and whose refills are due. Overnight patient messages get answered first. Afternoons go to rejected claims. They submit 340B claims data every two weeks, well inside the 45-day requirement. They are a well-oiled machine and they want as many deeper insights and data to inform more surgical clinical interventions for the most challenging patients and hardest-to-reach populations.
Where Alchemy helps:
- Our Medication Adherence Dashboard delivers clinical intelligence that prioritizes patients by urgency: which long-acting injectables are due, which patients are already out of medication, and which patients are trending toward a gap. Staff can filter by therapy and log every outreach attempt.
- Our ESP Reporting tool turns a pharmacy system export into a ready-to-submit report for clean, defensible claims.
- Auto-translation covers patient messages in Spanish, Mandarin and more to ensure language is never a barrier for access or adherence.
Despite stage, each CE shares common challenges and and long-term partner to solve them
Every one of these teams builds around the patient first and the workflow second. None of these teams lacks commitment. What slows them down often is time spent on work software should handle. What excites us as at Alchemy is that every one of their challenges maps to something we’ve built or have on our roadmap, and many of these ideas came straight from the people I met last week. After all, our job is to make the next stage easier to reach, wherever a CE starts.
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If you run a CE at any of these stages, we’d love to hear what's slowing you down. Reach out at youssef@alchemyhealth.com.
