Stowe pharmacy takes concierge approach to health care

Mountainside, which opened last week at 45 Old Farm Road — just off Route 100 on the south side of town — is the sister operation to Maxwell’s other business, Lakeside Pharmacy in Burlington. Like his Queen City location, Maxwell aims to fine-tune the pharmacy to his customers’ and patients’ needs. He said he can do that better than the corporate places because he has the independent’s freedom to react in a nimble fashion.

“Places like CVS, Walgreens, Amazon, they’ve all done just an amazing job at making things standardized, and that’s allowed them to expand, and that’s really great. But when you need to call somebody or you’re on vacation, whatever it might be, you’re just going to call an 800 number or try to live chat with somebody who you don’t know and who doesn’t care about you,” he said. “They don’t know your son’s birthday is coming up, and they’re not going to ask you how Easter was. I think we’re all looking for a little personal touch these days.”

That personal touch means a puppy adoption clinic held at the new pharmacy over the weekend — Maxwell dubbed it Puppy PILLooza.

It means the place carries skin care products and snack bars made in Vermont.

And it means concierge-level patient care that few pharmacies, or many health care clinics, for that matter, offer. Even though the place is so new that contractors are still waiting for mudseason to pass to pave and line the parking lot, Mountainside will eventually offer two types of in-house service.

The pharmacy has a couple of small private rooms that will allow Maxwell to provide collaborative practice agreements — arrangements where a pharmacist pairs up with a physician and a patient to manage medication.

One of the rooms will be used for telehealth sessions and other basic consultations. He said the corporate pharmacies in big cities have “minute clinics,” where customers can go and get minor medical maladies checked out without having to go to the emergency room or urgent care. Mountainside won’t have that, but it will provide some sort of concierge-level services.

“It’ll have that boutique feeling for the people of Stowe and anyone who wants that extra touch,” he said.

Maxwell plans on using the other for hormone optimization services. A relatively new type of treatment that involves synthesized hormones, the practice isn’t covered by most insurance, Maxwell said. But in one of Vermont’s wealthiest towns, where play is something that innumerable people don’t want to age out of, insurance might not be that much of a barrier.

“People could start to feel low libido, or their self-esteem is going down, or they’ve got no umph. All that can play a real active role in hormone imbalance,” he said. “This is for people who want to mountain bike until they’re 70, or whatever.”

Modern touches abound. Mountainside has a state-of-the-art pill-packing machine, which can be customized for every patient’s needs. The machine deposits an individual day’s worth of pills into small, easy to tear plastic pouches that folks with arthritis or other limited hand strength will find handy.

Even the pill bottles Mountainside uses are different than the ubiquitous orange plastic ones. These ones are blue and, Maxwell said, are designed to biodegrade 20 percent faster.

Although tiny touches like health optimization and $26 Ursa Major shaving cream will likely find their way into well-heeled Stowe bathrooms, Maxwell chirps in a near-conspiratorial tone about the money he can save people through a quirk of Vermont law that allows him to sell practically all over-the-counter items online at deep discounts — 30-40 percent off, including those fancy Vermont-made products.

“The cool part is, in Vermont, a pharmacist can create a prescription of any over-the-counter medicine. The idea is that will allow the patient to use either a health savings account or flex savings account to make it cheaper for them,” he said.

The discovery of that law led him to what will be his “only ego thing” in the enterprise, a program he’s calling MaxPax, after his last name. MaxPax are different curated bundles of over-the-counter items that he and his staff will come up with themes for different needs.

“For example, the allergy bundle, or skin, hair and nails, or muscle growth and recovery, or the bio hacker, or the hangover cure,” he said. “If they happen to be on prescriptions, we can package that all together, too.”

Maxwell said people tend to Google something or visit WebMD any time they start to get sniffles or a new pain, which can lead to them falling for quackery. He said when a pharmacy looks at things through a concierge or curator lens, the pharmacists on hand can do all that work for the customer.

After all, he said, pharmacists are doctors. They may not carry a stethoscope like a physician or wield a scalpel like a surgeon and cannot make diagnoses or otherwise treat a patient. But they can provide answers to the universe of medicines out there. Or at least find them.

“If you have a question that I don’t know the answer to, I’m going back to the studies and bringing it back to you to give you an informed decision about what you want,” Maxwell said. “It’s just the future, man. I’m not going to sit back and do the same business model as a pharmacy that hasn’t changed in 200 years.”