Trusted Messenger Communication Training for Pharmacists | Evidence-Based Patient Communication

Kelli Stovall 0:06

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. My name is Kelly Soval.

I’m the VP of Pharmacy Services and Clinical Programs at IPC. When our friend and colleague Kelly Sneed approached us about hosting a webinar featuring the Trusted Messenger Program, we were really excited to hop on board. Pharmacists are the trusted messengers in their community.

And we’re so happy to provide this webinar to support you and your communication with your patients. Now I’ll give it to Kelli for her introduction.

Kelli Sneed 0:36

Thank you, Kelli. We are excited. I’m Kelli Sneed, the Executive Director at AEPA.

And we’re excited to bring you Todd, Dr. Todd, and his message from the semester. And I’m going to go ahead and turn it over to him to get started.

Todd Wolynn 0:51

Thanks very much, Kelli and Kelli. I’m going to go ahead and share my screen. So I’m going to ask if you guys are going to be able to see.

Oh, wait, let’s hold on one sec.

Kelli Stovall 0:54

Mmh.

Todd Wolynn 1:05

Redo that here. All right, so we’re going to go share. And…

Yeah, this should do it. So let’s try. Are you guys able to see the introductory slide?

Kelli Stovall 1:18

Yes.

Todd Wolynn 1:19

Terrific. Okay. Wonderful.

All right. I’m going to go ahead then and start with the presentation. So thanks very much.

I’m honored to be able to speak to you guys. We are doing a ton of work with pharmacists and pharmacies with our trust and messenger program. So I’ll tell you a little bit more about that.

But we’re going to go ahead and jump in since we have a set amount of time. And this is really about evidence-based communication. And this is something that I will tell you that really no healthcare professionals are really taught, whether it was medical school, pharmacy school, nursing school, you name it, but it’s really what we need.

So I will tell you that my path, I’m A pediatrician, board certified pediatrician of 30 years. I was at the same practice for 30 years. The last half is CEO and leader until in leadership roles until I left the practice at the end of 24.

And then in 25, joined with a nonprofit effort, the Trusted Messenger Program, which is really about empowering healthcare professionals with evidence-based communication to drive quality outcomes. You pick the outcome. It could be helping people with a medication regimen, it could be immunizations, it could be point of care testing.

But whatever it is that you’re trying to do, I think the new realities of 2026 and moving forward requires that we’re better at communication than we are, and we never received the healthcare communication in the 1st place. I was 20 years into my path. And I had gone through college, through medical school, through residency, and I even went back to school and got a master in medical management, the MMM after my name, and still did not get communication training.

So I’ll tell you a little bit more about that. This is basically coming from interviews with a lot of different healthcare professionals. I’m saying the visits, E.

longer they just feel exhausted, anything feels contentious. You know, we’re seeing obviously parents of little kids are particularly being fired up, but pharmacists are doing the same thing that, you know, really every encounter feels like it can be more contentious than it ever was. And it’s causing a lot of, I would say, problems with the visits or the encounters becoming efficient.

Things take longer now. Things that you might have normally been able to talk about now seem to be oftentimes a little bit more uneasy for people who’ve been impacted by a lot of inaccurate information. But it also impacts effectiveness, right?

If we’re trying to keep somebody on a regimen because they may have been impacted by inaccurate information to explain them why that medication is important to complete out the full course or to get an immunization, and we’re not getting that result because they said, you know, I’m not sure that I want to do that, they may have issues that they’re not easily able to talk about, and we haven’t been trained to really be able to get that information from them to really engage them effectively or efficiently. So we’ll talk more about this. The failure isn’t a science.

I think you guys know better than me that we’ve never had the kind of therapeutics or diagnostics to get to decide which is the right therapeutic. to use. But think about when you came out of school or came out of your training programs and think about where we are now.

The science has never been better. The problem is that we’re failing as a… Communication science.

So this is me with our Trust Messenger Program Vice President of Communications and Strategy, Chad Herman. And this is back related to an article in 2009. And that 2009 article, you can probably read the title because it was easy to read from across the room.

It says, The Vaccine Dilemma. That was the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. And it was March 9th of 2009.

And you see there’s a mom on that picture kind of holding her son. He’s not making great eye contact with the camera. You go on to read that he has a diagnosis of autism and mom says she’s not sure if vaccines might not have played a role.

Four or five more paragraphs down, it was It’s like a full-page story. You find out that she also has a 2 1/2 year old son, also with the diagnosis of autism, has received 0 vaccines. My head exploded.

It was like, I was like, oh my goodness. You know, this is the title of this should be the genetics of autism. It certainly shouldn’t be the vaccine dilemma.

I thought that was pretty irresponsible. I think it fed this kind of narrative of, you know, are vaccines okay? When in fact, this story had nothing to do with the impact of vaccines.

Other than the mom thought maybe the first kids diagnosed to be related to it, but obviously the second child had no vaccines and still had the diagnosis of autism. We know autism has a huge. link to it.

Anyway, I wrote an op-ed to it and realized how powerful communication could be, whether it was in the form of a presentation or writing an op-ed. And this gentleman had the mistake, made the mistake of writing something favorable on the op-ed. I looked him up, I saw I was a communications teacher, and I’m like, you know, 20 years into my career, I’ve had no communications training.

So I asked him to be a communications teacher. coach or teacher to me, which he was for a year. And then I went back to my partners and I’m like, wow, I think we need a communications director in our pediatric practice.

And they’re like, that’s kind of crazy. I couldn’t convince them to bring him on full-time. They eventually agreed to bring him on part-time.

And then basically within six months, they said, oh my gosh, we need him full-time. And I’m like, I know, right? That’s how powerful communications is.

and you’ll see where this led. So obviously, we are now past that point and multiple years down the road. 2026 and now.

In the trusted messenger program, so the practice that we asked Chad to join us in was our. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Pediatrics. Our practice was recognized, those three pluses, kind of looking at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, downtown.

We have one all the way to the right, down in the south, one just behind downtown, an hour or two past it, and one several miles up to the north. Our practice was recognized not just regionally, but nationally for our quality, our connectedness, and also our communication. Based on value-based care metrics, we were the number one practice in our clinically integrated network in terms of our rate of immunizations.

Matter of fact, by the time we left in 2020, end of 24, for multiple years by third party data, we were the number one. One HPV vaccinating. In the state of Pennsylvania, we were also number one other metrics that they used for PI.

Right. And it’s. And we attributed a huge piece of this to how we communicated.

As you can see, there’s two large integrated delivery networks with their logos there. They were also in our clinically integrated network. They had pediatric footprints five times our size and 20 times our size.

And yet we led across every value-based care metric, either alone or tied by one of them. And again, we did not have more money than them. We did not have smarter healthcare professionals than them, but we used communication totally differently.

And as an independent practice working against two behemoths like that, it was really a leveler for us to be able to play on a really firm footing by using really good communication face to face and also digitally. Our story was told in a bunch of places and how we use communication, namely because in 2017, we created a video around the HPV vaccine called We Prevent Cancer. And we basically talked about the importance of this vaccine, how it was an anti-cancer vaccine.

Unfortunately, three weeks after we made that video, it became the target of a global campaign for people that did not share beliefs that were favorable about immunizations. And so they came at us, 10,000 attacks on our Facebook page in six days. But we decided not to pull the post down, actually mainly with Chad’s urging.

And we ended up doing research on it with the School of Public Health over at the University of Pittsburgh. And we published more than one time in the Journal of Vaccine. We also published another peer-reviewed journal as commentary in Nature Immunology.

But our story was also told all over the place. So streaming, streaming services were quite big back then, but they were coming online. We were there on podcasts, but we’re also on cable news networks and pretty much all major news print media.

We were also in three different documentaries. But apparently none of that means anything to your grandma or to your uncle unless you make it into People magazine, which we did. But now it was four years after that initial story, it was started being told.

So like I said, the groups that came after us in 2017, that was long past. Here we are in 2021 still using communication to reach out to our own families to help really help them understand what the reality was around the COVID or the COVID virus and the covid vaccine. And then People Magazine saw what we were doing.

They saw that we were doing this on multiple social channels. They saw me, unfortunately, dancing on TikTok, which my wife kind of found crazy. But anyway, the whole point was to reach people where they were at.

So we were doing really good communication face to face on our website, but also on social. We were doing podcasts and webinars as well. And we continue to do that work that we started in 2010 all the way through 2017, 2021 to current day, 2026.

Our trusted messenger program work is an extension of what we’ve been doing now for over 15 years. So let’s go a little further. So basically, when we talk about evidence-based medicine or public health interventions, they don’t work unless people trust the messengers.

But here’s the great news. People actually really trust their health care. professional, their healthcare providers.

And we know pharmacists, and I’ve learned this significantly over the last year and a half. A really dumb most. accessible healthcare professionals.

And frankly, that’s where I’ve gotten a lot of my adult vaccinations is in my pharmacy. So the great news is that healthcare professionals, nurses, docs, pharmacists, physician assistants, nurse practitioners really have an immense amount of trust. And I’m going to go over some of that data with you.

Now, this is in the face of trust dropping in institutions. Trust is dropping, whether we look at medicine or public health. It is dropping across the board there.

And there’s this narrative of like the medical industrial complex, right? Big health care is out to get you. You know, it’s pretty easy where, you know, people would easily start vilifying like pharma is bad, pharma is bad.

Then next thing was health insurances are bad. They’re bad. And it used to be you didn’t really attack health institutions so much.

But now it doesn’t matter if it’s some revered kind of long-storied health center, like maybe Kaiser or maybe Sutter, maybe in our area, UPMC, doesn’t matter. Like attacks are now being leveled at the health centers and the health complexes. as they’re just out to get us and everybody’s pushing medicine we don’t need and they’re trying to make profits.

And oftentimes those messages are coming from people that are pushing their own alternatives like oils or crystals, but somehow they don’t seem to be getting the same kind of flack. But I just am pointing out that there is an effort very much and very purposefully to drive more and more wedges between patients and the community and evidence-based science-based medicine. So here’s some of that data I was telling you about, right?

Trust is dropping, whether it’s government, my employer, media and journalists. Here again, another example of just trust dropping. This is from the Edelman Trust Barometer.

There’s 24, 25, 26 data all showing drops in these areas. But when you look at locally, my local circle wins. And so here’s trust in my doctor, but this also extends to my healthcare professional or healthcare provider.

So this could be a school nurse, it could be a pharmacist, it could be a physician assistant. Trust down at the local level is not only very high, but is actually growing. So that’s something to really take and have hope in that, because I’ll show you more slides why we should feel pretty emboldened by that data.

The key is that trust just by itself is not enough. So trust is local. That’s a nugget for you to take home.

And now here’s some more of that data. This is 24 data, but like I said, 25 and 26 continues to show it. Trust in my primary care provider.

Again, this certainly be a pharmacist, could be a school nurse, could be a doc, but that’s where the trust is growing. Actually, the other group, the other category that went up was trust in myself. And this was growing at even a fast rate, so…

10 points that year and continue up in 25 and 26 days. Again, trust dropping in those other areas. So, this is certainly a point for hope, but I want that that trust is not guaranteed.

You know, there’s leaders of national health agencies saying that, you know, vaccines are being pushed on people for no reason other than it makes profit for the people to give them. I will tell you, I’ve worked in vaccines for clinical vaccine researcher. I did that for 14 years.

I worked in my practice leading our vaccine purchasing and contracting. And I did a lot of work at the national level in relation to the business side of vaccines and how to buy them effectively, how to record them, to document them. And I will tell you, there’s a lot of groups that were buying vaccines that were losing money administering them because the profit margin is so thin.

So this narrative that, oh, people are making millions of dollars on giving vaccines is a bunch of bull. If you run it really effectively, you should be able to make a small amount of money. Same as an auto mechanic that stores mufflers.

They should make a small margin on storing mufflers. Any service or product industry, there should be a small amount. Otherwise, why would you be doing it?

Because you need to be able to stay in business. business. You need to pay your light and your gas and your insurance.

So, but sadly people are losing money on it. So again, that whole narrative about people are making millions of bucks is that example of people trying to drive a wedge between patients and their healthcare providers so that they’ll listen to the non-science narrative or they’ll buy products that aren’t science-based. One more survey.

This is actually January of 2026. This is Kaiser Family Foundation data, again, showing people’s trust in their doctor or health care provider. And if you combine 40% of a trust of a great deal or a fair amount, 46%, 86% compared to health agencies that are national in origin that are dropping in trust or individuals who are really dropping in trust.

So they trust you. But again, that doesn’t necessarily mean they believe you. So we need to really work toward how do we get from trust to belief?

And I’ll talk to you more about this. One last thing is that while you can’t get anybody in our country to agree on anything, it seems like across the political spectrum, that doesn’t seem to be true here with trust in health care professionals, because right, left and center, we see pretty big numbers of who do you trust to tell the truth around medical issues and protect public health. And it’s, again, my doctor, my health care professional, my health care provider.

And so pharmacists, again, nurses, PAs, NPs, we all are really in a great position in terms of being trusted. What are we going to do with it? Because right now, I will tell you, I think we squander it every day.

So you are the exception. The trust data is there. We are holding really firm, even though that is not guaranteed nor indefinite.

For right now, it’s there. We need to build upon that trust. We need to nourish it, fortify it, and really help our patients and their families to really have the best health outcomes as possible.

And that’s going to be based on the evidence-based information that’s medicine and healthcare and pharmacy that we have at our disposal. So we really need to employ it in a way that is going to require excellent communication. So we have trust, but we squander it every day because when we have patients coming to us and they’ve been impacted by inaccurate information, I see healthcare professionals really struggling with this.

I’ve had pharmacists tell me, you know, or the pharmacy techs there, but the pharmacist is behind them and they’ll see like eight people in line heading into respiratory season. And I’ve had some of them say now, like, you know, we don’t really make the recommendation for the vaccine unless the patient brings it up. Why would they say that?

Well, that’s an example of what you call temperature taking, right? You’re just trying to see like, well, if they bring it up, I know it won’t be a fight. So then I feel safe or comfortable talking about the vaccination.

But if I don’t know where their mind’s at on it, I’m fearful that if I recommend it, it’s going to get into one of these. And sadly, that ends up meaning that you don’t make good recommendations for a lot of people for fear of, I don’t know how to really navigate this well. I’m busy.

I got to get to the next customer in line, or I hear this from doctors as well. I got four or more patients already here. I don’t want to spend extra time.

I’m worried this is going to go bad. And I said, well, what if I could give you an evidence-based communication methodology that allows you to make an evidence-based recommendation and stand by the science? to hear out the patient and to build more trust, whether they accept your recommendation or whether they don’t.

And they’re like, we start talking about that. I’m like, right, because we’ve never gotten that training course, right? We’ve never seen that training information.

But that’s what I’m here to deliver today. Also, we have a CE module on it that’s free for one hour that talks about this. So we’ll talk more.

Actually, that’s the E module in the last I think 4 weeks has had close to like 400 or 500 pharmacists sign up for it. So again, some free hours, see E on healthcare communication that you guys can use. All right, so good communication.

I hope you see whether I’m building the case is essential for good healthcare. None of us are receiving that training. It has to be taught.

This is one more slide from the Edelman Trust Barometer. It just shows you that Yes, we may have trust, but you need to have good communication to reach over, to be able to help impact people, to support them, to guide them as they’re making their healthcare decisions with all those things, making sure there’s empathy, frequency, relevance, and we’ll go into this. So to increase patient acceptance of our recommendations, Yes, it’s built on trust, but it requires optimized evidence-based communication.

So pardon my kind of graphic drawing here. This is my version of stick figures, which I do like to draw, so I did it digitally here. But this is, let’s call this a medical exam where a patient comes in and I oftentimes will say, Could you imagine, you know, rooming that patient without getting a weight or a blood pressure first?

You know, oftentimes I’ll look to the nurses and the medical assistants. They’ll be like, no, you got to get that information. I’m like, right, I know.

And then I’ll often talk to, you know, pretty much all the healthcare professionals and everyone. I’ll say, can you imagine if you want to examine the patient? You didn’t have your stethoscope, you’d have your otoscope.

I mean, I remember myself literally walking out of the room saying, you know what, I forgot my stethoscope out there, I’ll be right back. Because I couldn’t do the exam without it. And yet we go into these patient encounters all the time, whether you have somebody at your counter who’s asking you questions or they say, well, yeah, they want maybe a vaccine and you’re talking about other vaccines that they may be recommended for.

You know, they’re not sure. And we just go and communicate, right? That kind of sense is, you’ve been communicating since, you know, elementary school, high school, you went through pharmacy school, just get in there and do some more communication.

But the problem is we’re kind of sitting ducks because the communication training we received does not serve us well with the realities of 2026 and going forward. And again, I can tell you an arc back. This is how we approach this is exactly what I’m going to be telling you, because our work is built on what we’ve been doing for over 15 years.

And we not only do this in a regional practice that’s for 20,000 patients, but then we got to scale it up over 300 practices over thousands of health care professionals, also closing value-based care gaps using better communication. And the notion of change is hard. Boy, oh boy, that last picture in the bottom there is a computer.

And I can tell you, I’m now old enough to remember when computers were just starting to be brought into the exam room. And the whole notion of, wait a minute, I have to have a computer now in the exam room with me seemed to be like, oh, it’s going to be ridiculous. How can I interact with a patient with a computer?

computer and now people can’t imagine doing this without computers. The beautiful thing is that this communication methodologies that I’ll be teaching you is not nearly as expensive an EMR or as expensive as an MRI, but it’s foundational. I would tell you that I would view this communication as important as this.

stethoscope or the computer or the blood pressure cuff, right? Like I don’t think we can do adequately good practice of healthcare, whether it’s in the pharmacy or in the doctor’s office, without really good communication. And yet we weren’t taught it.

So I’m going to give you two things about communication. One, I’m going to tell you to remember Bioactive, because I’m going to bring that up a little bit later. But I’ll also tell you that behavior is change with communication.

And if you think about it, that’s really what we do day in and day out. Trying to convince somebody why it’s important not to take this medication with that medication, or why it’s important to have more of this food or not that food, particularly if it’s in relation to the expertise that you guys bring to bear in terms of what impact it might have on medications that they take. But this is also true in the doctor’s office and anywhere else where we are engaging people directly and they are listening to us for our expertise.

The last thing I’ll say is, think about this comment, right? What we say to our patients matters, but how we say it matters more. If I asked you to think back to your best, you know, healthcare experience.

I’ll even say, go back to your worst healthcare experience. Typically, if I asked you to tell me more about that, you’d say, well, man, oh man, you know, I went to see this one doc. It was terrible.

You know, he wasn’t really listening to me. His hand was on the doorknob before I could even get my first question out. I started asking questions and I felt like he was rushing me.

kind of belittling me a little bit or flip it around. You know, I saw the stock. She was great.

You know, she took her time. She answered all my questions. She even asked me to make sure I understood the information she had given me, right?

Like, that’s all the difference between excellent communication and really lousy communication. So again, Some of us figure this out to a degree over time, but I will tell you, we’re not keeping up with the realities of 2026, which is exactly the communication training that we’ll be talking about today. So when I talk about behavior change, I tell healthcare professionals, really think about it.

This is really what we’re trying to do now. How do I get people to do more of some of these or less of some of these? You know, in practice, we now know the impact of oral health and starting that early was really important for, and we knew that from our dental associates who were telling us, like, it’s really important kids, families start getting kids to brush early and teaching about flossing because we now know oral health impacts all sorts of other systems.

But again, making sure that they aren’t vaping or drooling, or making sure that they’re exercising, right, or immunizing. I mean, all of these are kind of behavior change, and they all require good communication to really convey the ideas and to get people to understand why they’re important to accept. Now, these companies, I told you, already have eroding trust, right?

Corporations are dropping in terms of trust, but they are blowing it up in terms of changing people’s behavior with communication. Right? They use a variety of tools.

Sometimes it’s people representing the company face to face. Sometimes you see these companies when you’re engaging them online. And they do so to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars per year.

And they actually realize what’s called a positive ROI. For every $1 spent, they get more than $1 back. in products or services they’re trying to sell, right?

They use communication to get you to pay $12 for your double pump mocha latte or to let you know it’s pumpkin spice season that’s coming, right? And they can change your behavior with just good craft and communication. And again, they don’t have that inherent trust that we do.

And we aren’t hucking like tires or insurance or streaming services. We’re trying to get people to remain healthy. Or if they get sick.

to get better as quickly as possible, or if they have a chronic disease, to live their best possible life with the evidence-based guidance we can provide. So I think we’re doing pretty noble work, but why the hell is it that we can’t wrap our heads around using communication powerfully? We are the largest sector of the economy in the United States, and yet we can’t wrap our head around improving our communication skills.

whether it’s face-to-face or digitally. While these companies are just blowing it up and really impacting people’s behavior with sophisticated communication that, frankly, we could get and we are trusted. So combine those two, it would be incredibly impactful.

And yet we seem to keep flubbing it. So Yes, I would ask you to think about communications in a way very differently than a lot of healthcare executives I speak to. They hear the word communications and they’re like, oh, that’s nice.

You know, that’s like a soft skill. Go ahead and help with those communication things. And I’d say, oh, hell no.

I said, I want you to think of communications as driving clinical quality. I want you to think of communications as driving operational efficiency or effectiveness, because that’s what we did in our practice. We used communications so we got everybody in our practice rowing in the same direction, singing from the same song sheet, really working effectively as a team.

And of course, You have to do that to use communication to reach your parents, your patients, your families, your communities as to why you’re recommending things or telling them to take this action, right, or to follow this particular guidance. Now, again, you heard me mention the healthcare professionals and the staff themselves. The communication has to go internally as much as it does externally.

Because if you don’t have everybody on the same page, you run into problems that will bite you in the ****. And I’ll show you a slide on that. So again, in terms of immunizations or vaccines, I always like to point out that we don’t want to make assumptions.

Somebody may say, I don’t know, I don’t want that vaccine, but they just might be worried. They have a softball game that night and don’t want their arm to be sore. But, you know, everybody’s so sensitized that, oh, this could be a contentious issue that you immediately think, oh, these are people that don’t want any vaccines.

And that’s absolutely not true. But without good communication, you won’t know where on the continuum they sit. And most people are absolutely kind of in that movable middle where they just need good information at the right time from the right person that is you.

So let’s go a little further here. So this is, just imagine a pharmacy set up, right? You got people there toward the right coming in, waiting for the medication or checking in.

And let’s just say you have a Joey working the counter there. And a person checks in and Joey He sees them and this is a, let’s say it’s a 75 year old and they’re in and they got diabetes and some hypertension and Joey’s filming their meds and the patient actually says to them, yeah, I think I’m due for that flu vaccine and maybe even that covid vaccine. And Joey says, oh man, I just saw a TikTok yesterday.

says that flu vaccine doesn’t work at all. It actually can cause the flu. So I would tell you, Joey may not be the highest ranking person in that pharmacy, but he’s answering calls and checking everybody in.

Joey has way more connectivity than many people there. Joey sees people at the grocery store and at the Little League field, right? He is very connected in that community.

I mean, we learned this at our office when we opened up a regional breastfeeding center. I didn’t tell you, but I was a patient consultant for 25 years. We had one of our first families check and say, we’re here to see Dr.

Lynn for our breastfeeding medicine visit. And let’s just say it was Gladys who was working at the front. And she literally said, oh, breastfeeding.

You guys are breastfeeding, huh? Man, I tried that. My baby was never sicker.

Got dehydrated, had to get readmitted to the hospital. They ended up putting an IV in their head. Yeah, why don’t you just use formula?

You can see what’s in the bottle. How do you think that visit went? Not so good.

And we were unaware, right? Like, oh my gosh. We just kind of thought if we’re doing this initiative, everybody in the practice probably knows Oh, we should jump on board, but that’s not the way it works.

The culture of communication means getting everybody in the same page in your own setting. So basically what we had to do is bring everybody together, almost do an in-service and talk about, look, I don’t care if people choose to breastfeed or formula feed, that’s up to them. I just want them to have good information when they make that decision.

And if they decide to breastfeed, there are certainly medical benefits for breastfeeding, and we are here to support them. That’s why we just built out a regional breastfeeding center. But that could also be true if you’re offering immunizations, whether it’s COVID, RSV, or flu, or whatever it is.

But if you have people who are spouting off inaccurate information because they’ve been impacted, by inaccurate information, which we hear a lot regarding pharmacy techs and front office staff, no different than medical assistants where medical assistants and front office staff tend to be often more often impacted by inaccurate information. Now look, I’m not telling you that everybody’s going to become the same level of like Uber advocate, but nobody should be allowed to sync and an effort or an initiative that you’re doing. And frankly, your pharmacy might be that last best chance for that patient to get that immunization to help avoid an ICU admission or an intubation or death.

So it’s pretty serious. And if you have somebody there that, unbeknownst to them, they don’t realize that they’re putting out inaccurate information that can be swaying people the wrong way, Are they going to be taking responsibility for if that patient chooses not to immunize or not to follow that medication regimen because they were having inaccurate information and then sharing that? No.

So we really need to get the whole culture of communication in our own setting straight first. Like I said, everybody’s singing from the same song sheet, everybody from rowing in the same direction. I’ll digress for one second by saying I was lucky enough to hear a CEO lectureship by one of the co-founders of a place called Zingerman’s Deli up in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

And they have blown it up there. If you ever get a chance to eat there, it’s pretty amazing. They’ve now opened multiple other businesses.

The rule is they have to always build in Ann Arbor and they always have to build something different. So one of the things that has a deli. Anyway, he was talking about it and he started talking about the American workforce.

He said, imagine if you converted the American workforce into a football team or a soccer team and you were fielding 11 people. He said, based on polling data, it turns out that only four of the 11 people that you put on that field representing the American workforce Only four of them would know which goal was theirs. Even worse, only two of them would care if they reached their goal.

Right? So if you think about it, that kind of goes along with the mentality of a slow day is a good day, right? Because if you don’t really even know what you’re doing as far as which goal you’re going for, even care if you get there, a slow day is a good day.

I still get my pay, I still get my benefits. But if you can reach the people that are in the culture of your workplace with good communication and let them understand why what they do is so important to the outcome of the work you do, in this case, the health of your patients, or in the case of my practice, the health of our patients, then it makes a huge difference. I will give you one more example that he said.

He said, you know, is walking down the street, right? You walk down the street, you see somebody putting mortar on a brick and they slap it down on some more bricks, mortar on a brick, slap it down on some more bricks and you say, hey, what are you doing? Like, I’m A bricklayer, I’m laying bricks.

Okay, you go down two more miles down the road, you see somebody doing the exact same thing, mortar on a brick, mortar on a brick, slapping and then you say, hey, what are you doing? He goes, Oh, let me tell you what I’m doing. I’m building a cathedral.

You go about 75 more bricks down, I’m going to be building this archway where you’re going to walk through. It’s going to be beautiful. And about 250 more bricks down from there, I’m going to make this beautiful opening, circular opening for a stained glass window.

It’s going to let in light. It’s going to be amazing. Point is, that person knows the points of their work.

They know what they’re doing and why what they’re doing matters. And so if Joey starts to understand why it is you have an initiative regarding medication or in this case, a vaccination, and why that vaccination could be life-saving and making sure you dispel any inaccurate information they ask, again, maybe Joey’s not the best Uber advocate compared to everybody in that practice. or in that Pharmacy.

But again, nobody should be allowed to sync an initiative or be spouting off inaccurate information. So I hope that gives you a little bit of an idea where I’m at with that. Now, this is the slide I wish I had gotten when I was in medical school.

I wish we all would get this kind of training, but of course, when we don’t. So there’s how you think and how you feel, right? Where we’re coming at from our training is if somebody comes in, you make a recommendation, they disagree with you.

We are trained to like go with their head, right? Oh, they’re not thinking right. I got to give more data, more studies, more information.

Except that person is not another pharmacist or not another health-based professional, whether it’s a pharmacy tech or a nurse or a doc. They are just, you know, essentially oftentimes the general public, and they aren’t making decisions so much with how they just think. And frankly, that’s not how we make decisions, right?

You make decisions oftentimes how you feel. I know I should have a third Krispy Kreme donut, but I just love the way that tastes, feels so good, right? I know I should not stay up till midnight, doom scrolling.

I probably should go to bed at 10. But you know, that whole thing is designed for little hits of dopamine every time I swipe onto a new video. We make decisions with how we feel, except that’s not how we’re trained.

Our training fails us because we’re taught to go to their head. More data, more reports. Let me show you the data.

That is a failure. And then I work with sometimes and speak to some pretty crotchy old healthcare professionals who say, you know what, we just got to scare the hell out of them. Why don’t you bring back the pictures of what happens to them if they don’t follow our advice, you know, what this disease could do or what this infection could do.

But the problem is they’re already scared. And so if you lead with data or you lead with fear, you know, if they’re already scared, you can’t scare the fear out of somebody. So those are two really big favors.

Now, this is my picture of Aristotle, so bear with me. I’m not the world’s best drawer, but 2000 years ago, he had figured it out. He talked about 3 paths to persuasion.

The first he talked about was pathos, which notice how that lines up with feel. Because he talked about this is the most impactful path to persuasion because it addresses your values, your beliefs, and your emotions, fear being the strongest. So Aristotle understood you can’t go right to the head.

You have to reach and meet somebody. where they’re at. If they’re impacted down here, you need to understand that, and then you need to talk in a way that meets people where they’re at.

Then he talks about the second most powerful path of persuasion. That’s like your character, your reputation. Here’s great news.

I just gave you tons of data at the beginning of this talk showing you that we have years and years and years of data, including current data. that shows we are in fact trusted. As much as healthcare professionals feel kind of beat up right now, you are still trusted.

You just may not be believed because people have been impacted here. But if you can reach them here in pathos, values, beliefs, emotions, and you’re already trusted, then you can make that third path to persuasion, which is logic. People do want to hear about data.

They do want your professional opinion. They just don’t want you to lead with it if they’re already in a bad place with that information. So you would still make a recommendation, but you may need to go down here to figure out how to then follow through if somebody seems reluctant.

And we’re going to talk about that. All right. So think about this.

You guys are pretty familiar with the nervous system and the sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight mode, right? That seems kind of fight or flight. You’re reactive, you’re closed, you’re defensive, you’re guarded, right?

Those are all kind of, you know, very difficult kind of circumstance to take in new information. So when we talk to people, And they’re already on edge because they’ve been impacted by inaccurate information. And here you come along and say, oh, let me tell you about the, you know, what, you pick it, RSV vaccine, the shingles vaccine, the covid vaccine.

And they’re already like, oh, no, I heard bad stuff about that. They’re already in a not so great place. Where you want them to be is here.

They want them to just at least Be trustful, open to what you have to say, curious, willing to hear you outright. It’s where you would absolutely want your patients to be as you’re explaining something to them. And this, my friends, is that bioactive nature of communication.

The bioactive nature of communication can move you from that guarded position over to being open and curious and willing to hear you. But if you’re not a good communicator, you can drive somebody back over to being more guarded and more closed off. Now, here’s the deal.

Think about it. You make a recommendation. Oh, Mrs.

Jones, you know, you’re due for your shingles vaccine. We really should get that. You had chicken pox as a kid that says here, I don’t see shingles vaccine on there.

But she’s heard bad things about it. She’s kind of already here and now she’s getting ready because she just told you no, and she’s bracing, right, for you to lecture her or pressure her or bully her, right? Because she’s like, oh man, I just told this, you know, my trusted healthcare professional, I don’t want to do what they just asked me to do.

But in 2026, What I’m going to tell you is that health care professionals also start to fall into that guarded mode because they’re like, oh, crap. I just tried to make the recommendation. Here we go.

There’s going to be one of these because they just said no. If they say yes, it’ll be easy. But now they’re saying, I don’t think so.

Now I know we’ve got to fight on here. So now you have the health care professional in this guarded mode and you have the patient in This guarded mode, how good do you think that’s going to go for changing anybody’s mind with evidence-based information? Not so good.

So the first thing I’m going to tell you is just because somebody says, I’m not so sure, or, you know, maybe I want some more information, maybe go home and I’ll talk to my husband or my kids about it. That doesn’t mean that there’s a fight on your hands. It just means that they’re not believing that it’s as important as the recommendation you just made.

So what are you going to do about it? Well, What I would tell you first thing is check yourself and recognize, huh, got to use some good communication skills, which I’m going to teach you. So you got to get yourself out of this fight or flight mode and get into like, oh, okay, let me figure out what’s going on.

Let me be open and curious, and I’ll give you a pretty quick, succinct way, because I know time is valuable and we don’t have an hour to spend with every patient. Trust me. I was the CEO of a practice.

I understand that. But if I could teach you, and when I say this to healthcare professionals, I could teach you, what if I could teach you an evidence-based communication methodology that allows you to make that evidence-based recommendation, stand by the signs, hear the person out, and to build trust, whether they accept your recommendation or not. Right?

Wish we would learn that. Okay, so let’s go forward. Now, we’re going to focus first with face-to-face communication.

I recognize the importance of digital too. So, you know, again, if you make this recommendation, they say, I’m not so sure, they could go in that fight or flight mode, you could get in that fight or flight mode. And I’m going to say, let’s not go there.

Now, the one thing I’m going to ask you is, you know, I ask healthcare professionals all the time, have you had motivational interviewing training? And they’ll be like, almost 100% of the hands go up. But, you know, I say, well, Danny, you feel it’s helping you navigate difficult conversations, vaccination or otherwise?

Literally, I get less than 1% of hands up. So motivational interviewing, I will tell you there’s elements in it of what I’m going to teach you, which is called the AIMS methodology, but what people are getting right now to me doesn’t seem to be resonating. So what we teach seems to be really resonating.

And it’s been blowing up, which has been great. I’m so thankful. So I’m going to jump into it.

And it’s basically called AIMS. Okay, announce, inquire, mirror, and secure. Okay, so this is how the recommendation would be made.

You still should always make what’s called a presumptive recommendation. You would say something like, hey, Mrs. Jones, today you really should be getting your flu and your covid vaccine.

Let’s go ahead and get those today. I’m right here in the pharmacy. It’s clear, it’s presumptive.

Short to the point, OK, now. You don’t want to start with a question. Do you think you want these vaccines or do you want to hear about vaccines today?

You know, I liken that to say, you know, if a two-month old came in, I do an exam, they look great and I say, oh, do you want to put them in the rear of the car in an appropriately installed car seat? Or do you want to put them up in the front seat with you? Or do you want to put them on the hood of your car?

You know, whatever you do. I don’t want to make you feel better. Of course, you know, when I tell healthcare providers that, they all laugh.

They’re like, I would never do that. I’m like, so why are you doing that for vaccines? Clear, concise.

Hey, Mrs. Jones, today you’re due for your flu and your COVID. Let’s go ahead and get those done today.

And she may say, you know, I don’t know about that. Maybe she says, all right, I’ll take the flu. I don’t want to, I don’t know whether I want the COVID.

And you know, you know, 70, 78, diabetes, maybe she’s, you know, those are significant risk factors. We already know what the data shows, the importance about her getting a covid vaccination. So now inquire, Mr.

Jones. I thought you went the flu, but can you tell a little bit more about what’s concerned you about the about the flu vaccine or the covid vaccine? And then I’m genuinely trying to figure it out.

I am open. I want to learn more. And she may tell me, yeah, you know, my son-in-law sent me a Instagram reel saying that that covid vaccine has something that causes cancer in it.

I’m not comfortable with that. And then you mirror back to her, literally using her words, saying, I want to make sure I got this straight. Your son-in-law shared an Instagram reel with you that actually said inside that covid vaccine, there’s something that causes cancer.

Do I get that? Did I get that right? You’re actually asking for confirmation.

So instead of you saying, no, that’s not possible. There’s no data to show that. Let me show you more data.

You’re actually inquiring. Then you’re mirroring back to confirm you understand. She now knows you know what’s scaring her.

You haven’t beat her up, you haven’t demeaned her, you haven’t bullied her or pressured her, right? You’re literally just there trying to understand. She goes, yep, that’s right.

That’s what’s worrying me. Well, now you go to address that issue. as you address it, you express empathy, right?

Not around the myth. Of course, there’s not a cancer-causing agent in the vaccine, but she’s scared there might be. So you can express empathy over it.

It really sucks to feel scared. So you could say something like, oh my gosh, if I thought that were true, that would scare the heck out of me. I would want more information or I might even want to hold off.

Can I tell you why I got it or why I recommended it and got it for my grandparents or my parents, right? So now I’m asking permission. Can I ask, can I tell you why?

So she’s realizing, okay, you’re not beating me up, you’re not pressuring me and you’re also curing me out, right? Good active listening, good body language. I’m here, I’m inquiring, I’m open to understanding what’s concerning her.

I’m empathizing over how lousy it is to be scared. And now I’m asking permission, can I share with you why I’m so passionate about you getting this protection, the same protection I made sure I got or I recommended for my family members or my other patients. And no matter what happens at the end of that, whether she hears you out and she goes, you know what, okay, let’s go ahead and get that vaccine or those vaccines today, Or she says, you know, I just want to get that one, but let me give a little more information on the other one.

You’re building trust. She realizes you didn’t beat her up, you listened to her, you understood, you empathize, and she’s going to be in a much better place with discussing things with you next time. And like I said, she may accept at that point.

And I ended oftentimes by saying, so we can talk about it next time you’re here, or if you have questions, call me soon. or you can come back in and we’ll get it for you. That’s a much different approach than what we’ve ever been taught to do.

So let me just show you what this looks like when it’s mapped out. Here’s another example. This is 1 for an adolescent who says they’re due for their TDAP, their HPV, and meningitis is what the HCP says.

And you know, the mom says, well, you know what, she needs that TDAP and that she doesn’t have to have HP for school, just get those two. And so you follow up with an inquiry. No, it sounds like okay with the HPV vaccine.

Yeah, that’s right. And it says it sounds like there’s concerns specifically around the HPV. Can you tell me more?

It just would help me better understand how to how to best, you know, care for you guys. And she goes, well, you know, my mom sent me on Facebook showing that the HPV vaccine could cause infertility. So you mirror, you know, I want to make sure I understand this.

So what you said was your mom said your Facebook post says the HPV vaccine can cause sterilization or infertility or some kind of difficulty with getting pregnant. Is that right? She goes, yeah, that’s right.

And the video also said it’s being covered up. Now I express some empathy. My goodness, I understand why you’re worried.

If I thought that were happening, I’d be worried too. And then you go on to secure. Would it be okay if I shared why I’m recommending this vaccine for you or your child and why I made sure that I got it for my kids too?

You know, in my example, I would oftentimes tell them, can I tell you why I got it for my daughter and for my twin boys? Now, if you don’t have a daughter and twin boys, don’t use that example. It’s all about being genuine, being personal and telling the real facts.

So if you don’t have kids, say why you recommend it for your nephew and your niece or your neighbors or your other patients. And then here I go into the data where I address the specific issues of what’s in it for them. Like, here’s the benefit from that vaccine.

As a matter of fact, there’s no data to show that it causes infertility. There’s actually data showing the other way. If you don’t get the vaccine, you get HP.

infection, it actually does drive down fertility for all sorts of reasons. And in this case, the mom follows up by saying, wow, okay, that’s helpful. Let’s go ahead and get the vaccines.

I still thank her. But had she said no, I would still thank her and say, thanks so much for letting me share why I’m so passionate about it, why I wanted you to get it. Also, thank you for sharing your concerns and we can talk about it later.

So again, you made a presumptive recommendation. You did active listening. confirmed understanding, expressed empathy, and, you know, as you see the other pieces here, use genuine comments, asking permission, talk about shared concerns, and move on.

So this. communication methodology that I’m telling you is designed to build trust, not to force a yes. It’s not to coerce somebody.

If nothing else and you build more trust, you’re still succeeding. It’s evidence-based and it provides a path again for good listening with active listening and empathy. And it’s about building trust even when your recommendations refused.

It definitely improves confidence. We have tons of data around this for people to learn this methodology. And it also improves patient satisfaction because they feel heard.

Our Google reviews were blown through the roof because people felt heard and listened to. The best part is, unlike what we’re hearing a lot of people when we ask them if they have any training like this, is they tell us, and we’ve seen it, that it’s quickly learned, easily implemented, and it improves as you use it like anything else. Now, I won’t go into a huge amount of this, but this is again, how we are now paid in healthcare.

So it’s not just for things we do now. We move from fee for service to value-based care. And the way you achieve value-based care metrics is being measured in population health.

And the best way to do large swaths of people is not that face-to-face communication, because you can only see so many patients in a day. So it’s using things like social media. I don’t have a ton of time to talk about this, but I will tell you, particularly if you’re an independent pharmacist, the way we used social media as an independent practice was incredibly powerful.

And as I told you, I think it allowed us to level the playing field against these billion dollar integrated delivery networks because we use social media powerfully while they use it kind of in a horrible way. If you think about it, there’s these entities, they’ll own 100 practices, and they’ll have one social media page to represent 100 practices. That, my friends, is literally the formula for how you take social out of social media.

If I have one social media page and I open it up as a family member of one of those 100 offices, And it’s the same message that all 100 people are getting like, oh, a new office opened up 7 hours away from me. Or, oh, look, oh, they’re building a new wing on the hospital or they just spent $900 million on that new genetic therapy. That has no relevance to me.

That’s kind of like a branding tool. What I want to know is from my local healthcare professional, whether it’s, you know, Dr. Joe or Sally, my pharmacist, I want to hear what they are thinking about us heading into respiratory season.

So you need to, you know, keep trust local. I tell large systems if they’re not really decentralizing their messaging, they’re actually using social media in a way that actually feeds the narrative of big healthcare or industrial medical complex. The other thing is I talk to a lot of high level healthcare professionals and they oftentimes confound and confuse marketing for communication.

They are not the same. Marketing is top down. It pushes a brand.

Communication should be bi-directional and meet people where they’re at. So there are ways to use digital to do this as well. We did it.

We serve 20,000 families and we did it. did it when we were working with thousands and thousands of families at a much larger scale too. So I tell these larger health entities, look, marketing is for the patients you don’t have.

I know everybody wants new patients, but communication should be for the patients you do have. And it’s about driving better health and health decisions. So I hope you’ve gotten this point that good communication is essential, good healthcare.

Again, we don’t get the training we need, but we do need the training and we need to be better face to face because that’s incredibly powerful, impactful, and intimate discussions. We’re one-on-one, but that’s not scalable. So we also need to use digital powerfully too.

If we’re doing this well, we can actually impact a lot of things, not just the value-based care metrics off to the far right, but your whole team can improve from better communication. Patient satisfaction, as I said, blows up, and the healthcare professionals themselves feel more empowered to be able to navigate these conversations. And again, when people say, oh, you know, this could get political, I said, look, We are not about appealing to extreme right or extreme left.

We’re about building a bigger tent and bringing everybody under that tent, left, right, and center. Who does not want their kid to be healthy? Who themselves does not want to be healthy?

Well, that is all of us. We want good health, right? But we have to communicate in a way that we can bring everybody under that same tent and say, look, I don’t care what you, I’ve never asked somebody their religion or their politics.

I just want to get them better or to get them to continue to live well. And I want them to know that. Good communication allows for that.

Finally, if we’re building this effective and resilient healthcare communication ecosystem, it should happen everywhere, not just face to face, not just digitally, but it can happen in portals or emails or text-based campaigns, webs and podcasts, lots of different ways. So these aren’t the only two, but they are two of the most impactful. Finally, this is that CECME module that I told you about.

It’s free, it’s one hour. Again, it’s actually credited for one hour of free credit for MDs, DOs, PAs, MPs. RNs and pharmacists.

So yes, pharmacists can get your CE. It’s better than another CE in on, you know, constipation, because the answer for that is Miralax. That’s not a hard one.

But no, no joking aside, this really, the communication training I’m telling you about is treatment agnostic. It works just as good for immunizations as it does for chronic disease management, or point of care testing, or you name whatever you’re trying to do. Could be a diet, could be a physical therapy regimen.

It’s good communication helps in any aspect where we’re trying to engage patients and trying to get behavior change. And with that, I would tell you, we are ramping up our podcast that will be coming out again soon. So keep an eye.

If you want to follow us regularly, follow us on LinkedIn. I would like to say thank you. And if you’d like to give me a little feedback on how you thought this presentation went, I’d love for you to snap off that QR code and give us a little feedback on the training.

And with that, I think I left us about 5 minutes for some Q&A. So I’m going to stop sharing. And yeah, and you guys will have access to these slides afterward.

So I’d like to thank you for your attention.

Kelli Stovall 52:33

Do we have any questions? I know we’re running close to time. So I’ll say thank you everyone for spending part of your day with us.

We hope that from today’s session, you could take some practical tools back to your pharmacy and communicate with your patients in a better way. Remember the CE that’s available, we’ll also send out notification of that too. So

Todd Wolynn 52:39

Yeah.

Kelli Stovall 52:59

That’s easy for you to get. TODD, thank you so much.

Todd Wolynn 53:02

Thank you very much. I appreciate it. It’s been an honor to speak to you guys, and you know, best of luck moving forward.

Kelli Stovall 53:08

All right. Thank you.

Todd Wolynn 53:09

Thank you. Bye-bye.

Kelli Stovall 53:11

Bye-bye.