The PittPharmacy (Class of 2021) team of Holly Graber and Emily Liu with their faculty advisor Karen Pater, PharmD and their Independent Coach Lindsey Meston won the Pennsylvania Pharmacists Association’s 2019 Achieving Independence Competition during PPA’s 2019 Annual Conference held at the Seven Springs Resort on September 21, 2019 in Champion, PA.
This competition is designed to foster the budding entrepreneurial pharmacy students to one day own their own pharmacy. Students create a business plan based on either starting up a brand new pharmacy in Pennsylvania or purchasing an existing pharmacy and implement creative changes. The business plan is then developed into a poster and the students deliver an oral ten-minutes overview presentation followed by up to five minutes of questioning by the judges. Following the delivery of all presentations, the five judge panel critiques the presentations and assigns point values in various areas such as innovative concepts and creativity, feasibility, and format, to determine a winner.
The panel of judges included: Edward Bechtel –owner of Bechtel’s Pharmacy; Mike Fapore – President and Owner, The Medicine Shoppe in Somerset; Deron Shultz – Vice President of Professional Services and Director of Community Pharmacy at Minnich’s Pharmacy; Ron McDermott – Senior Vice President, Pharmacy Operations for Hometown Pharmacy Solutions and Garry Mrozek – CEO, Hometown Pharmacy.
Additionally teams from Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, and Jefferson College of Pharmacy also participated in the annual competition.
