CEimpact Podcast
The CEimpact Podcast features three shows; GameChangers, Precept2Practice, and LevelUp.
The GameChangers podcast, hosted by Geoff Wall, features the latest game-changing pharmacotherapy advances impacting patient care. New episodes arrive every Monday, and users can earn CPE from each episode.
The Precept2Practice podcast, hosted by Kathy Scott, features information and resources you can use to precept students and residents. New episodes arrive on the third Wednesday of every month. CEimpact CE Plan members can earn CPE for each episode.
To support our shows, give us a follow and check back each week for our latest episodes.
CEimpact Podcast
Pharmacy Fast Facts: Drug Information vs. RX Continuing Education
Join Ashlee as she talks with Derek Borkowski, CEO and founder of Pyrls about the journey that led to the creation of Pyrls. Alongside this, Derek discusses Pyrls' partnership with CEimpact and the future of Pyrls as a company.
Pyrls is an online drug information provider that focuses on design and simplicity in their delivery of that information. Through an deeper dive into Pyrls, this episode offers up an exclusive behind-the-scenes glimpse into the future of digital health and the role of technology in the medical field.
In this episode, the two discuss:
- The creation of Pyrls
- Pyrls' impact on the healthcare world
- Pyrls' partnership with CEimpact
- The future of Pyrls
To learn more about CEimpact's By Design memberships, click here.
Welcome to our show, derek, the CEO, founder, who is literally all over social media these days. I feel so honored to be on the show with you, derek. Welcome to Level Up.
Speaker 2:Thanks, ashley, I appreciate the opportunity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's been really nice getting to meet you over the past several months and learning more about you and learning more about pearls and the inception of pearls and how you came to be in the CE Impact world. So, just for some background, we have partnered CE Impact has partnered with pearls as just one of those core partnerships that we have created this symbiotic relationship with the two companies. A lot of people have turned to us wanting graphs and charts and quick go-to study guides for their practice, their day-to-day practice, and we invest in our products for like a holistic, on a CE basis mostly, and we thought that this was a perfect combination to what is needed in practice today to partner with someone like Derek and his team. So that's just a quick background. But, yeah, welcome Derek, and we're just really excited to get to know you more and share with our audience who you are and your company.
Speaker 2:Thanks again, Ashley, and likewise equally enthusiastic about the opportunity to work with CE Impact on our end.
Speaker 1:So I think it's really exciting time for you in your career. You are the founder and CEO of Pearl, so do you mind sharing a little bit about your background, how you came to be a founder and what you do on a day-to-day basis?
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally. So first and foremost, I say I'm a pharmacist I expect most folks listening to this podcast and so I graduated in 2018 from the University of Minnesota School of Pharmacy. And I say I've wanted to be a pharmacist since I think at least as early as middle school, because my mom worked in an outpatient community setting. So when I did work, you know, community pharmacy was really my first passion. During pharmacy school, I happened to get sort of a interest in some of the non-traditional type of careers that sort of led to learning about kind of this area of digital health and technology and what ways that people with pharm-d's can make careers in a technology area. And so, yeah, just to really, you know, to give the short story on how Pearl's got started, I, while I was doing an internship here in pharmacy school, it was at a digital health company that here in Minneapolis called my Meds. Anyway, they were a medication adherence company that makes a website and a mobile app to help patients track their meds on time, and so that experience there really inspired me as a student to want to really double down on learning more about technology. I started learning how to program while I was doing that internship and that's ultimately what led to I can share. You know, we can get maybe more into this story if it makes sense, but because it wasn't not super well planned.
Speaker 2:Going to the how did I become a founder? Now I like to say there's well, there's not my insight, but there's kind of, generally speaking, two ways to start a business. You know. One is to do a business plan and try and identify, you know, areas of need where you know where money can be made. And the other is to just try and solve their own problems. And so mine was very much the ladder there.
Speaker 2:So while I was working as a student on my APPEs and then later while I was working as a Walgreens pharmacist, I had the desire to try and just make for myself a better, quicker drug information app to look up things like counseling points. While I was at the pharmacy and you know I did not identify a market opportunity. I was not like, oh, there's X number of dollars to be made on drug information resources. It was, how can I make something better for myself here at the pharmacy? And so I can kind of get into what pearls is and the ways that we do that, but um, yeah, sort of the pearls about a little over three years ago and have been, um you know, fortunate over that time to have continued to work in the pharmacy for a bit and then now be full time in this endeavor, working with other individuals and trying to really bring more value to pharmacists, physicians, nurses, clinical students on how they get their drug information.
Speaker 1:Nice, I. You're literally. Your name is all over the Facebook world. I mean, it's all over LinkedIn, it's in these big Facebook groups. I'm a part of pharmacists mom's group and I prefer fully see, you know this. Pearls is everywhere. So you're like a little pharmacy, famous at the moment and this is really exciting to be at the forefront with you and to ride this journey with you and to and to partner and to encourage people to not only follow pearls but to follow you. I think you have the right mindset of your pharmacists. But also you saw this problem and you're like how can we solve this? It's a person, it's a, it's a speaking of a personal brand. That's the recording we did, that's the CE that we put on last month and for pharmacists, for American Pharmacists month, that was the perfect segue to identify a problem and create the solution to it and be the solutionist. So I think you've identified exactly exactly that in pearls. So tell us a little bit about pearls. What, what exactly does it entail and what you know? What is it exactly?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So you know I expect a lot of listeners maybe have the same question that I'm gonna try and answer right now, which this this you know, in sales calls we have this will come up. You know I, or a method I've learned for when you're trying to do sales, is trying, now, you know, identify the biggest issues that the buyer may see right away. And so the the rhetorical question, or actually what let's maybe get the question I'll throw out to the audience and and I like to bring up in sales calls, I think it's really important is it does the world did? The world did or does the world need another drug reference? Like, don't we have enough? Yeah, yeah, and you know it is pearls really creating something new, like you know, drug references have been around since they, since they have all things on you know, stone tablets. You know the reporting information to look at.
Speaker 1:Google, right, I mean there's search engines, yeah precisely it's.
Speaker 2:You know it's medical information is, you know, ubiquitous across to. You know places that people get their information now and so you know what the. You know the differentiator that pearls was built around. You know the the existing sort of drug information reference products. You know. But you just Everyone I'm sure was listening this can think of an incumbent name in their head right now. They, you know that industry was started sort of as an encyclopedia industry and so you know there's. You can read everything about Drugs in existing references.
Speaker 2:But what I was finding the need for was to have a quicker way to look up the information I needed to take action upon at the pharmacy. So I need a quicker access to how do I counsel a patient on a drug, what are the counseling points of this drug. So that's something pearls is really focused on is giving users the ability to Get actual information on counseling. The even bigger area so you know, the tagline I like to say for pearls is you know, whereas other drug references tell you everything about the drug, pearls tells you how to use the drug. So you you on on pretty much every drug reference. You can look up and read that metformin is for diabetes, but where's its place in therapy? Is it first line, is it second line? What are the latest guidelines? Say so the the quick points on how to use the drug.
Speaker 2:So that's kind of what pearls is really built around, is you come into pearls to actionably look up what's the place in therapy of this drug, and so we do that through our drug monographs, our info charts, and ultimately, is where we're going next, just trying to build more of a platform for for drug information.
Speaker 2:So, for example, we've recently added a feature where users can now put their own drug information resources inside of pearls. It's like having Google Drive inside of pearls. So, basically, the website you come to to both look up the professional, authoritative information that pearls provides, but also your local antibiogram or your renal dosing Blinks that you have. And then, to that end, something I know well Maybe we'll talk a little late, you know, now or later in this, in this conversation is, you know, working with CE. Impact is something we're really excited about. To make it so that you know we have a partner that we can Send individuals to when meeting that medical information need of getting there, you know, getting their education credits and taking, you know, interactive practice ready assessments and and activities to Stay on top of their license.
Speaker 1:Right, how do you stay? I mean, who does your team consist of? How do you manage all of this? Because there's millions of money I mean thousands, if not millions of medications in the world it just seems very trivial and it's very challenging on. That seems like a such a high risk, like how do you guys keep up? How do you keep up?
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, totally. I'm smiling because this is something that occurred to me but I didn't get too hard about when I was starting this business. You're like wait a minute now.
Speaker 1:You're in too deep now, Derek you got a couple of solutions.
Speaker 2:Precisely when I started this. I was not a drug information expert by any means. I was a regular community pharmacist, with most of my training being around that practice. Right now, just to talk about what our team consists of is we have a full-time team of individuals in-house at parole all pharmacists but then we have a much larger contractor network of other Our in-house team I would categorize as generalist pharmacists and then we have a contractor pool of specialists in all kinds of different areas who all of them pretty much just want to make sure I'm going through my head, but now everyone has a full-time job as a practicing clinical specialist in a certain area or we have a lot of faculty members as well, who are part of our contractor pool, and so a pharmacist serves as the primary author of every piece of content and then also as the peer reviewers of the information.
Speaker 2:We also have physician associates MDs are in a prior editorial policy. We can also have any advanced practitioner serve as a peer reviewer or primary author of our content as well. But actually, how do we keep things up to date? So I'll just talk to our drug pages. So we assure that we keep the quality up to date on a monthly basis, but actually it's much more than that. So, Brian, one of my team members, his primary job every single day when he starts work is to implement all of the FDA changes that have happened to product labels that day, whether it takes him whether there's zero that day or it's where it takes the whole.
Speaker 2:That's his job is. And we have we've figured out, I would say, the formula to how we build automations to allow us to do that very efficiently. I would say, probably to do what? Maybe 10 years ago and for what? 10 years and previously ago we've taken a much larger team to do than we've built automations to allow us to do. And then the other thing I'll say is we we, we think very carefully about one of the variables when we decide to add content into our product is how maintainable is it, and we were very cautious about making sure we don't add content that we can't maintain.
Speaker 2:So, for example, we added a COVID vaccines table in our product at one point and we actually ended up pulling it because things were just changing so fast and sort of it was hard to you know keep up with where to get the notices on and from who on the recommendations for the the very different products, and so and we noticed that it wasn't something people were really looking at, even though COVID was happening and whatnot. People, I think, knew to go directly to the CDC or the FDA websites to get the, or their employer was providing them with what protocols to use, and so we just found that it wasn't a very high impact resource in our product and it was taking up a ton of maintainability bandwidth, and so we decided to scrap it. And so we're very making sure we don't add content that we can't ensure is always maintained, because that's one of the other things I think we just take most pride in is always having you know the latest guidelines incorporated into the relevant content when they're available.
Speaker 1:So how does it work? Someone comes, someone will download your app and then, if they're when they're working, they have a question how to walk us through how it works.
Speaker 2:Yeah, totally. So there's a few different, I would say, ideal customer profiles or most common types of users that we have, and one of them I'll just call it yeah is the the community or ambulatory care pharmacists and typically doing patient consultation or MTM are the main types of activities that at point of care individuals are utilizing pearls, and so the way that they're doing that is quickly, you know, if they're about to counsel a patient. You know pearls makes it really. You know, with two clicks you can view the you know a really high yields set of counseling points to consider. Walking through your patient in that visit, you can assemble lists of their entire medication list and walk through all the counseling points individually for the list.
Speaker 2:And then the other kind of key area is the ability to get guideline recommendations. So when you're, you know take let's take the situation of you're getting ready to do a, a see, you know a comprehensive medication management visits or or even just a, you know a CMR, complete medication review, comprehensive medication review you can utilize pearls to walk through the med list and assure that all the pay oh, I see the patients on. Yeah, you know, met foreman and a sulfonuria, and oh, well, let's take a look at what the guidelines say. You know, is that the appropriate one to punch for this patient based upon their you know characteristics and you know in my is there is there. Is there a more evidence based way that this patient should be treated? As I'm thinking about addressing this, you know pearls allows, you know, the ability to kind of quickly get the answers to those information, to get the information to make those assessments Very cool.
Speaker 1:I love it. What do you think the next step would be for someone? So then they would go to the charts, go to the graphs, go to the app and then is there anything beyond that in for the pharmacist to, I guess, manage in charge of what in terms? Let me start over the last race and erase that outside of being in the MTM setting or managing the medications directly with the patient right there. So you mentioned at the top of the discussion how there's storage information so they could go store their local anti biogram or their health systems PDFs or their policies and procedures. So how would that be? Flipping through, like they would be flipping through to get the answers that they're looking for in the app, or how does that work? How is it integrated?
Speaker 2:I appreciate how you're perfectly queuing me up to talk about our features right now.
Speaker 1:Sorry, that was not planned, I'm just curious.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you, yeah, so, as mentioned, I would say that one of the most differentiating pieces of pearls is that it's not just a static drug reference where we tell you what you should know about drugs.
Speaker 2:So the first thing that you should know about the pearls is now becoming a platform where, yes, you can upload your own hospitals renal dosing protocol, and so when you're doing an assessment, maybe you want to look at the seph triaxone drug page in pearls to quickly get for yourself the key points on determining if the drug is clinically appropriate from a safety perspective or a efficacy perspective.
Speaker 2:So, right inside of the pearls platform, you can pull up your local renal dosing protocol or maybe a society guideline. Verbatim. You can upload PDFs that you own and store and images and other things right inside of pearls, just like Google Drive, and so you can toggle from the section inside of pearls where you see our monographs over to the section where you've stored your own files, and so all users, all free users get 10 gigabytes and all of our pro users get 100 gigabytes of storage where they can keep all of that content, and this is actually one interesting area that we're looking to apply artificial intelligence to as well. So that's a no. It's a very buzzy word. Right now there's a lot of you know figuring out that we're all doing, but one of the unique ways that we're this is not live right now. Maybe we'll even attend this, the podcast.
Speaker 2:But we are workshopping the ability to have an artificial intelligence assistant that helps make sure your library is up to date so it can read your files and detect hey, ashley, you have. You're keeping the 2021 guideline in here. There's actually a newer version of it, so you should update that. And so, or hey, we noticed that you have. You know, you've uploaded 30 files into your library. The AI can automatically suggest a foldering system for it. And let's put all your cardiology related files in this folder and let's put all your infectious disease files in this other folder. So, taking some of that manual work away, that allows you to stay organized.
Speaker 2:The other use case to what you mentioned to, you know, beyond point of care, a really common use case of pearls also is educating oneself. So you know, we've I would say that that same user that maybe using pearls at point of care for looking up information they need, you know, just as easily this is a very common thing that that individuals will do is, you know, sit on their phone or on the computer and just read through pearl stroke pages to learn, or a pharmacotherapy reviews. So I know that's a also, you know, a common type of activity that we are working to build out further just the ability to make the information useful, both right. Whatever scenario you are, you're encountering it.
Speaker 1:Well I think that's what I'm hearing is your value that you bring to the market. Like you mentioned, there's a lot of resources available. There are a lot of people who are dedicated to drug information, but I think what differentiates pearls, what I'm hearing is the up to date In the moment, daily check ins with actually what's happening in practice and making sure that someone has quick and easy access to the tools that they need to take, safely, take care and manage their patients.
Speaker 2:Precisely.
Speaker 1:All right, talk to us why you chose CE impact to be your partner for CE. I mean, tell us you know why you think it, what the solution is here, because I think some people might be questioning what's the difference between drug information and CE. That's just some of the people who we've been talking to about the drug information, but they're like what are you? I'm confused, what's the difference? And so we've created in Jen's desk this weekend, so this weekend, but this podcast won't be recorded or won't be posted for another couple weeks. But this weekend we're talking to our readers about the difference between CE and drug information, which we think is really important. There is a clear distinction, but it also is a symbiosis and a clear, direct benefit to the pharmacist practicing. But you know, tell us a little bit about your experience working with CE impact. How did you, how did you meet us and what we miss. That lives and talks like.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, maybe I'll, or well it's, it's, it's bursting out of me. To start with the superficial Um, what I mean by that is, you know, a really common, I guess, um you could just say it to me. Nice word but um, I'll literally. People will say that I just like the way pearls looks. I like the shiny, you know, I like the shiny colors, I like how it's. You know why can't we have nice things in healthcare? You know, pearls actually feels like a nicely right and after designed product curated, designed a product.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, and really we started with, you know, we started with the interface before we actually curated the content. So, like with pearls, we like our drug monographs. We started with what's the ideal way that a drug monograph looks, you know, starting with a digital canvas, so incumbent drug references. They most of them in that industry started as books and then they just made the books digital and that's great.
Speaker 2:But we thought, hey, what if we're starting with the digital canvas? What is the ideal way that a drug monograph can be interacted with to quickly access counseling points, clinical points, dosing, et cetera? And then we, you know we crafted backwards from there and curated the information, and so that's where a lot of what a big, a huge piece of what resonates with pearls users is. You know that it's just, it feels like it's a product built with high quality and care, um, and you know that that's so. That's again. I know maybe it's not superficial, but with that, with C impact, you know that's always been my. You know my first interactions with C impact as a user, as a preceptor, having it available to me. You know it's all. It is a product in the. You know the activities, the website, the branding, the colors, the words, the messaging. You know the from Jen's desk. You know from the person. You know not. You know the. The ethos of C impact is uh, we are spiritually aligned as companies from that front. That was my. You know that. That, honestly, maybe the biggest reason that I'm just so excited to be.
Speaker 2:You know, um, partnering and um, you know, further to what you were saying about just, you know the symbiosis. You know we build resources. You know typically you know you know drug information and a lot of times it's about you know point of care and quick point of care information. But you know, obviously with CE it's about you know learning objectives and in really you know, getting a thorough grounding and understanding. You know on new topics, oh, and you have to get credits and like, like, like, so just being able to work with an expert you know in in the area of, you know just credentialing and um in building you know learning activities to keep farms at the top of their license is um is yeah, why that? You know the symbiosis?
Speaker 2:I you know that you mentioned is. I think that's the right word.
Speaker 1:Love that. And you met us through. What conference were you at? I think we met, or you met, Kathy and Josh at a conference. Well, we, we, I think, exchange communications prior to that or or had heard about each other prior to that, but I think we were sitting next to you at a booth I can't speak to. Is that what?
Speaker 2:happened? Well, yeah, at the AACP conference we had the opportunity to meet in person. But, yeah, prior to that, you know just, I think, being, you know neighbors, um, you know we're, you know Pearl's being, and we're both remote, with Pearl's being based out of Minnesota and CE impact being worn out of Iowa. You know just a lot of you know, um, you know, essentially, you know collaborators in the Midwest on on farm innovation. There's been a lot of you know personal. You know have had others, have been friends with other students who have been interns or worked at CE impact and cool I'd say that, yeah, the connection, uh you know, is uh more personal than um uh that you know, than most companies would would happen to have.
Speaker 2:So that's awesome.
Speaker 1:Well, we have something very exciting for the listeners. I'm going to pause this for a second so we can clarify. Here we go. Okay, bracen, we have to scratch that and start over because I wanted to clarify with Derek. So I am excited about this partnership that's just starting.
Speaker 1:I mean, we're just collaborating, we're getting to know each other, we're dating and all of the Gen's Desk newsletter recipients will be receiving our content this week about what they can do to take Next Step 2 off to into pearls and how they can learn more about the charts and the graphs and how you can learn more about the drug information and the readily available resources that are on their app and on their platform. And it's going to be vice versa. So members in pearls are going to receive a discount into CEI, ce Impact, advanced Trainings and Memberships. So we're excited to test this. We're excited to see how we can support, from an education standpoint and from practical in the moment, taking care of patients, how we can both support. We are both companies that are in the interest of benefiting the pharmacists in pharmacy professions. So we're just excited to take a deep look at how this is going to work and how we can support our pharmacists to move forward.
Speaker 2:I suppose yeah, yeah, I know I'm excited for the kind of joint value that we're bringing to the table to hopefully cover most of all the pharmacists' information and educational and knowledge needs to make the most of their practice and stay at the top of their license.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I feel like everyone says that, so that's something that we're just doing and I guess we have to, I guess. So we're doing it. Now is the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you guys are providing the top notch CE to actually do that. And if our product sinks or swims on bringing the absolute best clinical, yeah, so we are doing that.
Speaker 1:I feel like that's such a cheeky thing to say about pharmacy in today. I think we just need to take steps to take the best, most optimal care of our patients and I think beyond that is up to people like us to support pharmacists to continue to do that. So, derek, super great having you on our partnership team and we're excited to work with you. We're excited to see pearls grow and again, you are like a celebrity in pharmacy, so keep up the good work. We really support you and your ambitions, and we have multiple platforms that we're working on internally at CE Impact, so we understand how hard it is to do what you're doing, so keep doing it. We support you.
Speaker 2:Likewise Thanks, Ashley.
Speaker 1:Yeah, of course.