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The reasons that Ryan Mezinger pursued a life in the pharmacy space in the first place were slowly driving him out of the industry. The newly minted senior vice president and chief pharmacy officer at the Cleveland-based MetroHealth System initially pursued pharmacy instead of medicine because he wanted to have a longer impact on a patient’s health journey. Instead of seeing patients annually, he could regularly interact with them, get to know about their lives, and take pride in knowing the journeys of those he served.
But after nearly two decades in retail pharmacy, Mezinger saw the pharmacy industry shifting toward numbers rather than the patient.
“I saw the journey of where retail pharmacy was going and how it was becoming more transactional and impersonal,” Mezinger says. “But the phones were ringing off the hook, there was just no time left for those important interactions because the business was becoming about getting as many people as possible in and out.”
“You deserve to have a healthy life, and your life circumstances shouldn’t be a barrier to the best medical treatment.”
Ryan Mezinger
Then came the opportunity to join MetroHealth, a public health system whose patient base includes a great number of people whose everyday lives could be severely impacted by their ability to pay for their medications. At the time, MetroHealth’s pharmacy organization was just fifty employees with four pharmacies. What Mezinger and his team have built is nothing short of incredible.
Through five roles and nearly nine years, Mezinger and company have endeavored to create what the SVP calls “the pharmacy experience that patients deserve.” This has required a massive lift on multiple fronts.
In his first four years, his team built seven new pharmacies. But those locations would go unoccupied unless the organization could increase its 6 percent patient capture rate of new prescriptions. At present, that rate is 55 percent and MetroHealth’s pharmacies filled over 1.6 million prescriptions in 2023. In order to improve their patient refill retention rate from 35 percent to its current 80 percent rate, Mezinger’s organization built a centralized pharmacy campus that encompasses a home delivery service with partner Phox Health to get medications to patient’s homes in just a handful of days, or same-day service if the patient needs it.
The fulfillment location for prescriptions was previously only able to fill about one thousand prescriptions a day. Mezinger recalls receiving complaints early on in his tenure about patients waiting up to three days for medication at retail pharmacy locations.
“We addressed this by opening a full-service pharmacy campus with a service excellence team that houses our call center, prior authorization team, specialty team, and a mail order/fulfillment team,” Mezinger says. “We were also able to implement some massive production automation line with BD/Parata that made a huge difference.”
An original team of 50 is now 425, and pharmacists and technicians now have far more time to interface directly with patients to answer questions and create the kind of personalized experience Mezinger was looking to develop.
“If we see a copay that a patient can’t afford, we look for financial assistance, we look for programs, and we look for grants that can ensure the best possible outcomes”
Ryan Mezinger
That fulfillment location now completes more than three thousand prescriptions a day, all while giving patient-facing pharmacies more time to do what they do best at MetroHealth’s retail locations like vaccinations and consultations.
In 2021, MetroHealth moved to Epic Pharmacy Software, an incredibly novel move for a pharmacy organization. But Mezinger says it’s just a broader part of the team’s 360-degree patient care model, to be able to see if patients have refilled needed prescriptions, and if not, to be able to understand why and keep them adherent to their essential medications.
The organization’s Meds to Beds program also ensures that before patients are discharged from the hospital, they have the medications they need in hand.
Maybe most important is MetroHealth’s commitment to pursue any means necessary to ensure that patients can afford their meds.
“If we see a copay that a patient can’t afford, we look for financial assistance, we look for programs, and we look for grants that can ensure the best possible outcomes,” Mezinger explains. “You deserve to have a healthy life, and your life circumstances shouldn’t be a barrier to the best medical treatment.”
It’s easy to understand why Mezinger has risen through so many roles and why he feels so fulfilled in what MetroHealth has built. But the SVP says so much of what he has done is in tribute to his previous boss and mentor. Former assistant director of outpatient retail pharmacy Mario Pisano was, in many ways, the mentor who provided Mezinger lessons to live by. Pisano died unexpectedly in 2018, and everything that Mezinger has built with his team he says is a tribute to the leader who taught him so much.
Mezinger could have simply walked away from an industry he saw changing in ways he couldn’t align with, but instead, he chose to be part of the solution. Mezinger and his organization are helping patients regain the ability to trust their pharmacists and to know that they understand where their patients are coming from.
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