The Dose by Dr. Thea Blystone 🔈

You’ve already done the work. You just never called it care management — and you never got paid for it.

Every day at the counter, you support, educate, and hold patients accountable to better outcomes between their office visits. You answer the 8 p.m. phone call. You explain the lab result nobody else took time to explain. That’s not “just being a pharmacist.” That’s care coordination, and it has a name, a structure, and a billing code.

In this episode of The Dose, Dr. Thea Blystone makes the case that you don’t need more clinical knowledge to build a care management practice. More knowledge does not equal a business. You need the structure and the frameworks to name what you already do, claim it as your work, and finally get paid for it.

Here’s the math that should keep you up at night: there are over 311,000 pharmacists in this country. If each of us took 200 patients, we could cover every Medicare life in America — without even working full-time. The industry of pharmacy is shrinking. The value of a pharmacist is not.

If this one resonates, tell me which part you want more help with. And if someone in your network needs to hear it, send it their way.

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You might see your doctor a few times a year, but most of your health happens in the days between those visits. In this talk, recorded at a community symposium in Crawford County, I share what I learned when I took (and then taught) the Diabetes Prevention Program, and why I think it’s one of the most practical tools we have.In this episode:• Building your plate: fruits and vegetables first, then protein, then carbs• Rethinking what you drink• Hidden sodium, and why to shop the outside of the grocery store• Sitting less, the sit-to-stand test, and fall risk• Why sleep and a steady bedtime matter• How age-friendly pharmacy and between-visit care keep patients from falling through the cracks• Medicare open enrollment for 2027, and why you shouldn’t “set it and forget it”I close with a few questions to bring to your next appointment: What’s my A1C? What’s my blood pressure at home compared to in the office?

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A couple on my panel started paying a copay to work with me, and I didn’t find out until after. When I asked if they were okay with it, they told me why they were. It took me months to understand what they meant. This week, the answer most of you gave me, and what I wish someone had told me 15 years ago.

Tomorrow night, Tue Oct 13 at 7 pm ET: The Possibility Finder.

Join through The Full Prescription founding tier.

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An hour and 48 minutes from home. Three drive-thru windows. Two technicians who'd already called off. By close we'd filled almost 1,500 prescriptions, and I still had the drive home ahead of me. It took me 15 years to answer the question I asked myself in that parking lot. This week I'm asking you.

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“If this really works, why isn’t everyone doing it?”

I hear that question all the time from pharmacists. It’s a fair question. So in this bonus episode, I answer it two ways.

First, with what care management actually is: the same conversations you’ve been having at the pharmacy counter for years. Support, education, and accountability between office visits, with one extra step that gets you paid for it.

Second, with a 2 a.m. phone call from pharmacy school, when I told my mom I wanted to quit. She didn’t give me a pep talk. She gave me one sentence, told me to go to bed, and hung up.

Turns out she answered this question 25 years before anyone asked it.

🎙️ 6 minutes. Listen, then tell me: what’s the reason YOU haven’t started?

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There was an office I called constantly from the retail counter. Prior auths, prescriptions that didn't look right, whatever needed cleaning up on a Tuesday afternoon. I never thought of it as anything but my job.

Years later, when I decided to build my own practice and needed a physician to talk to, that's the office I called. They already knew me. They still didn't say yes right away. It took months of showing up, a physician who left the country for a month, and weeks where nothing moved at all.

In this episode, I share what happened next, the trust bucket I didn't know I'd been filling for years, and what a pharmacist I'm coaching found when she looked at her own "ordinary" work a little differently.

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I've known her for years. We worked beside each other at the hospital. So why, walking into her long-term care facility last week, did I feel like I might throw up? Eight years, 21 physician partners, hundreds of patients, and the butterflies still showed up right on schedule.

Monetize Your Expertise | ASCP Annual Meeting, National Harbor | Halloween Weekend Register Here

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A pharmacist told me she wanted to do something that made her light up when someone asked what she did for a living.

I repeated it back on the recording and then stopped talking. Eight years into building this, I didn't know that was the thing I'd been chasing the whole time.

She also had two conversations she called basic. One ended with a cardiologist offering her an open door and asking a question she couldn't answer.

What she said that I didn't see coming, and why the part that scares you isn't the part that's actually hard.

She couldn't answer the billing question. You don't have to be her.

I'm teaching Monetize Your Expertise live at the ASCP Annual Meeting — Thursday, October 29, at the Gaylord National in National Harbor, MD. Four hours in the room with me, plus the full home-study program and 10 hours of CE.

Use THEA500OFF for $500 off. You'll also need to be registered for the annual meeting.Register here: ASCP.com/CareMgmtCert

Registration closes well before October 29. Get your seat today!

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I walked in an hour early the day after Labor Day. The queue had been sitting for three days. I ate at 2:30.

Nobody counted that hour. Nobody counted the three days. And here’s the part that took me years to admit. I wasn’t counting it either.

Seven minutes on what it costs when your labor is invisible, and why the CMS proposal on the table right now makes this the wrong year to stay quiet about it.

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Last week I told you loyalty might be holding you in place, and then I ended the episode without giving you a single thing to do about it. This one fixes that.

Twenty percent of a working life is decided for you. The other eighty is how you answer it, and nobody in twenty years of pharmacy ever told me that part was mine.

Inside: the four questions I run every hard decision through, why you should write the do-not-want list first if the first question comes back blank, what I decided I actually wanted out of a floating shift, and the five-minute rule my kids can recite.

Take the assessment: tmrx.care/tbo-assessment

If this one lands, send it to the pharmacist you thought about while you were listening.

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