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Not quite, but the continued evolution of Kerr Drug’s Community Healthcare Center store concept certainly offers a glimpse into what role community pharmacy could play in the American healthcare system of the future—and it goes far beyond just medication therapy management. Like the deal CVS Caremark announced in November with Generation Health, pharmacogenomics, the study of how genetics influence drug response, represents the new frontier of community pharmacy. And it’s a brave new world out there, to be sure.

A couple of issues back I wrote a column about a question a guy asked me at conference earlier this fall: “So, who’s bigger—CVS or Walgreens?” Ironically, it was the week each company opened its 7,000th store. The point: If you’re measuring these companies based solely on who operates the most stores, if that’s the way you’re keeping score, you’re watching the wrong game.

I still believe that.

As the healthcare reform debate continues and discussions of public vs. private are tossed about, what seems to be getting lost in all of the muck are the cost-controlling levers that already exist, like those reforms CVS Caremark's Tom Ryan outlined.

For example, getting patients to take their medications as prescribed could have a major impact on driving down costs -- to the tune of billions of dollars a year -- while improving healthcare outcomes of patients.

What kind of an impact can you make in 30 seconds or even two minutes?

For Walgreens president and CEO Greg Wasson, 30 seconds was plenty of time.

NEW YORK CVS Caremark’s 2009 “Health IQ” study is yet another indicator coming from the private sector that health reform cannot wait.

The findings come on the heels of another sign: PhRMA’s resurrection of the Harry and Louise characters, the middle class couple who helped to defeat the Clinton healthcare reform proposal, in a new multi-million dollar ad campaign developed in collaboration with Families USA, the national organization for healthcare consumers. This time, however, Harry and Louise are in support of healthcare reform.

NEW YORK — If anyone thinks that CVS has recast itself solely as a healthcare company, given its string of acquisitions in recent years — particularly, Caremark and MinuteClinic — they probably haven’t seen a Beauty360 store yet. In fact, standing in the middle of one of these 3,000 sq.-ft., high-end beauty boutiques, you might have a hard time recognizing you were in a CVS store at all.

Concerning the effort to shift the nation’s healthcare system away from paper records and handwritten prescriptions toward a fully coordinated system linked through health information technology, CVS Caremark apparently gets it. The company’s leaders have shown a firm grasp of the potential for reaching patients — and keeping them involved in their own health and wellness regimen — through Internet-based tools like Google.