After Successful First Year, Good Shepherd Pharmacy Focused on Growth

Not long after Good Shepherd Health opened its Memphis-based membership and charity-based pharmacy about a year ago, pharmacist and founder Dr. Philip Baker explained the motivation driving his operation. It was things like a disdain for the big markups at major commercial pharmacies, and a desire to get prescriptions into the hands of people who most need them.

The progress Good Shepherd has made since September 2015? It now counts 298 paying members to its pharmacy, members who pay $30 a month for individuals or $50 a month for families to get all of their medications free. And it’s served more than 500 uninsured Memphians with some $755,000 worth of free prescriptions they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.

“We want to get these prescriptions into the hands of the people who need them, who aren’t able to afford them,” Baker said at that time.

That’s still the philosophy that underpins the pharmacy’s operation. Going forward, said co-founder and business manager Will Singleterry, the plan is to get the word out to more people, to get more prescriptions into the hands of the most needy.

The organization also has just begun a partnership that should help it bring more people into its orbit. Good Shepherd has teamed up with the Church Health Center as a result of talks that started about three months ago.

See the full article at Memphis Daily News.