An estimated 3,000 people visit Crosstown Concourse each day, most of them working for or a customer, client or patient of one of the building’s tenants. There are also more than 260 apartments on the property as well as a high school that just opened its doors for its first class of 125 freshmen.
In addition to all the people who visit Crosstown daily since it opened in August 2017, there is also a steady stream of people showing up to do freelance assignments or to work remotely from their employer’s or home office.
Shannon Little left her job in marketing with the Huey's restaurant chain in Memphis to start her own solo marketing and social media venture. Such ventures at first glance might seem like a dime a dozen, leaving her with a task that had to be addressed before meeting with her first client.
She now handles marketing and social media efforts for several small businesses and is able to juggle all the tasks that go with that because she took the time to form a plan for herself at the very beginning.
"Define your target audience, your offerings and what value those offerings can bring to that audience," Little said, "My business became stronger, and my processes more streamlined, when I was able to define those terms."
Whenever Dr. Amara Elochukwu discharges a patient and sends them away with medications, she always worries after they leave if they’ll actually be able to afford the drugs.
If they can’t, she often wonders, what’s the point? Why even prescribe them? That concern explains why Dr. Elochukwu is in the process of joining Good Shepherd Pharmacy in Memphis on a part-time basis as the pharmacy’s first chief medical officer.
Read the full article at Memphis Daily News.
Elochukwu, who trained in internal medicine, was attracted to the position because of her experience at the hospital.
Read the full article at Biz Journals.
MEMPHIS, Tenn. -- When Shannon Little started her own public relations firm a few years ago, she quickly learned about the costs of being her own boss.
"I had one medication. When I had insurance, it cost me $50 a month. When I lost my insurance, my neighborhood pharmacy wanted to charge me $600 a month."
Little says $600 was a price she absolutely couldn't pay.
"That's a good percentage of my income, especially starting out as a new business owner, to be able to afford just one of my medications," Little said.
That feeling of sticker shock at the pharmacy counter is becoming more common.
Good Shepherd Pharmacy and National Foundation for Transplants (NFT) have partnered to bring affordable medication to Tennessee transplant patients. NFT assists families with financial hardships by providing grants for transplant-related expenses, and now its recipients will have access to free or at-cost prescription medication through Good Shepherd Pharmacy.
As if finding affordable healthcare wasn’t daunting enough, especially during this shortened open enrollment period, millions of Americans are also extremely concerned about the continued rising cost of prescription drugs.
In many cases, it’s cheaper to self-pay for prescriptions. And while there are, in fact, ways to save money on those recurring costs, most people don’t know about them or don’t think to ask their doctor or pharmacist about any cost-saving measures.
With the debilitating costs of many pharmaceuticals, individuals can be confronted with choosing between medicine and other necessities like food, utilities or even rent. Sometimes, people will ration their prescriptions to extend periods between refilling.
Two Memphis-based nonprofits, the National Transplant Foundation and Good Shepherd Pharmacy, have teamed up to defray the cost of life-saving medications for recovering transplant patients.
“It is a new program and as far as I know we are the only one of this kind,” said Dr. Phillip Baker, founder of Good Shepherd Pharmacy, a nonprofit membership-based pharmacy that provides medications to those who lack health insurance.
Nationally, anti-rejection medication, which is part of the recovery following a transplant surgery, typically runs about $2,400 a month. Even with insurance, out-of-pocket costs can range from $200 to $600. Most patients recovering from surgery can’t work. Many are housebound and some are bed-ridden.
Patients of the National Transplant Foundation can receive financial hardship grants for transplant-related costs. This can drastically reduce or even eliminate the expense. In addition to anti-rejection medication, maintenance medications and medications prescribed for adverse reactions are included.
Through a partnership with Good Shepherd Pharmacy, patients who have received transplants can access pharmaceuticals at a reduced rate.
Good Shepherd Pharmacy and the National Foundation for Transplants have teamed up to bring affordable medication to Tennessee transplant patients.
NFT helps families with financial hardships by providing grants for transplant-related expenses, and now their patients will also have access to either free or at-cost prescription medication through Good Shepherd Pharmacy.
Tennessee health officials are writing new rules that would give people a way to donate unused drugs to charity. The legislature passed a bill earlier this year modeled after a statute in Iowa.
The proposal came from Rep. Cameron Sexton, R-Crossville, whose wife is a pharmacist. The legislation sailed through with most seeing it as a no-brainer.
Phillip Baker runs Good Shepherd Pharmacy in Memphis, which is one of the only nonprofit drug counters that has expressed interest in using the new law. And he says people come to him with cabinets full of perfectly good medicine.
"It was probably a weekly occurrence," he says. "Somebody would call and say, 'my grandfather died and I have all this unopened medicine.' And in the state of Tennessee, I was having to tell them, 'I'm sorry, I can't accept donations. You're just going to have to throw that stuff away.'"
Most of the prescriptions you'll pick up at Good Shepherd Pharmacy are already cheaper than most.
Now add to that list: EpiPens, used to treat severe allergic reactions.
It's a life-saving device that once sold for around $100 and is now about $600.
Monday, EpiPen's maker said it will create a cheaper, generic version, but as Dr. Phil Baker explains, that could take weeks — weeks most people who need EpiPens just don't have.
"If you need an EpiPen, there's a good chance that you're gonna die without it," Dr. Phil Baker of Good Shepherd Pharmacy says.
After a donation last month, Baker says his pharmacy is giving EpiPens away to some customers for free.
"You have to have no prescription insurance and your income has to be below a pretty high level," he says.
That income level is about $50,000 a year.
There's still 53 of the EpiPens up for grabs, but surprisingly, Baker says not a lot of folks have been by to claim one.
"A lot of people just think it's too good to be true, that we would have these for free."
If you’d like an EpiPen, Baker says you can reach out to the pharmacy through its website.
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.
