Pharmacy of Grace Featured on KC Cares: Expanding Medication Access

Shawnee, KS — Pharmacy of Grace President and CEO, Dr. Michael Fink, recently sat down with Ruth Baum Bigus on the KC Cares podcast to discuss our growing impact across the metro and expansion into Shawnee/Johnson County, Kansas. In the interview, Dr. Fink shares how Pharmacy of Grace began, our recent expansion into a second location in Shawnee, Kansas, and how localized care, multilingual support, and strategic community partnerships are lowering barriers to healthcare.

At Pharmacy of Grace, we believe that no one should ever have to choose between putting food on the table and taking life-saving medicine. With 10% of our Kansas City neighbors uninsured and up to 40% underinsured, cost remains a massive barrier to basic health. Our mission is to bridge that gap by serving individuals and families living at or below 300% of the federal poverty level, ensuring high-quality pharmacy care and deeply discounted medications reach those who need them most.

You can listen to the full interview on YouTube, and the KC Cares Facebook or LinkedIn page.

(Below is the complete transcript of their conversation.)

 

Transcript: KC Cares Podcast – Pharmacy of Grace: Expanding Medication Access

Ruth Baum Bigus 00:15

Welcome to KC Cares the voice of nonprofits. We share the stories of people, organizations, working to enhance the quality of life for Kansas City, for our residents and our visitors. This KC Care segment is brought to you by the Ewing Marianne Kaufman Foundation. www.Kauffmanorg. I’m Ruth Baum Bigus. Did you know that one in 10 people across the Kansas City metro area are uninsured? And even more surprising, as many as 40% are underinsured. That means 1000s of our neighbors are making impossible choices every day, paying for groceries or paying for medications they need to stay healthy. The good news: there is help right here in our community. Our guest today is making sure cost isn’t the reason someone goes without life-saving medicine. Pharmacy of Grace was founded in 2022 by a local pharmacist who recognized a growing need and decided to act. Today, this remarkable nonprofit is expanding its reach, helping individuals and families living at or below 300% of the federal poverty level access deeply discounted prescription medications that can truly change and even save lives. Joining us today is Dr. Michael Fink. He’s the president and CEO of Pharmacy of Grace. We’re going to chat about this innovative nonprofit and how it’s removing barriers to healthcare, and discover how all of us can help ensure that everyone in our community has access to the medications they need, Dr. Fink. Welcome. We’re so delighted to have you here on KC Cares.

Michael Fink 01:48

Well, thank you very much, and I appreciate the opportunity to tell the community about Pharmacy of Grace this morning.

Ruth Baum Bigus 01:55

Well, a number of years ago, we did have your founder on and talked about, but that’s already been four plus years. Four years. So let’s go back, though, and let’s talk a little bit about your roots and and what exactly you were doing to help people.

Michael Fink 02:16

Well, as you stated, we’ve been around four years. Our organization started to form before 2020. Actually, just took us a little while to get it off the ground. And what we did after COVID and after the organization took a little pause getting back from that period was to make sure that we were in a good place in Kansas City to help those patients and people in the community that were having the burdens of being able to afford medications and not understanding the medications they were taking. Our founder John Yost, he had been on a mission trip to Ohio where he discovered that there was a pharmacy in the basement of a church that was working to bring medication access to the homeless and underinsured in the Columbus, Ohio area. When he had seen that model, he had brought something similar, or the idea similar back to Kansas City, we have expanded on it a little bit. We do do prescriptions. We’re a full service pharmacy, but our mission is to serve the uninsured, underinsured, and also the homeless population of patients that do not have medication access.

Ruth Baum Bigus 03:45

So, do you sure serve the general public? Someone who’s not in that situation or those situations.

Michael Fink 03:54

Yes, we are able to serve the general public. Actually, as part of our mission, by doing that, that does help bring in some revenue for our pharmacy. That does help some offset some of the costs to our uninsured patients. So the community can support us in multiple ways: donations and through using our pharmacy as your regular retail pharmacy. What you’ll find different about us is that we do look to focus on not only providing access to medications, but really sit down with patients that have questions. We treat it more of like a clinic experience where you know we can pull you into a room, one of our counseling rooms, sit down with you and go a little more in depth on the prescriptions.

Ruth Baum Bigus 04:46

That’s wonderful. I think everybody could use that for sure. Sometimes you’re given a medicine and it’s great you’ve got a medicine to treat something, but it’s like okay, what’s in this? How does it mix with maybe other medications? You know, just inform me, educate me.

Michael Fink 05:02

Yeah, as Dr. Yost points out, the trend in the United States or the statistics that are out there just show that about seven out of 10 of the prescriptions that are written are filled. So you have three out of 10 prescriptions that go unfilled even after they have seen their doctor, and then out of one one out of two of those is not taken correctly by the patient. So we’re trying to close that gap of accessibility and understanding, so the patient understands why the doctor wrote the prescription, why it’s important for them to take it, and and weigh that cost benefit for themselves. Of is this medication right for me? And we just want you know a lot of our patients don’t understand the English language, so we will even bring an interpreter online to help get that piece across to them of the importance of taking a medication and side effects to watch for.

Ruth Baum Bigus 06:07

That’s great. Let’s go back a little bit. You started your journey, I believe, with the organization as a pharmacist, working within.

Michael Fink 06:18

Yes, I was our first employee, so employee number one for Pharmacy of Grace. I started in 2021, and my my duties at that time were just to begin the process of opening the pharmacy. So doing all the licensure, all the credentialing for the pharmacy to be able to get the pharmacy up and running, and then we were able to open our doors in July of 2022.

Ruth Baum Bigus 06:48

What was that time like? I mean, remember, everyone, we were still. We were in COVID and coming out of COVID. So, what was the experience like? And being a nonprofit to boot.

Michael Fink 07:02

Yeah, the experience was like no other that I had before. I had previously worked for HyVee and then Cerner, so that kind of structure was all built within. In opening the pharmacy here as a nonprofit, it was more about raising the funds to show that we could actually build and pay for the services or the pharmacy that we were trying to put together to service the needs, and then as we gathered those funds and saw that we were able to open our doors, we move forward. And like you stated, with COVID going on, there were delays in materials and products. So when we started the process in January, we had finished around July, where we were finally able to open our doors to the public.

Ruth Baum Bigus 07:56

Let’s talk a little bit about funding. How do how does the organization go about doing that, and and where does the majority of your funding come from?

Michael Fink 08:09

A lot of our funding comes from individual donors that you know regularly contribute to us. A lot of them go to our website and they’re able to set up their monthly funding for our program. We also are able to use foundations in the area that have greatly supported our needs. Probably as far back as 2018, there are partners that we have been in discussion with since that time, that have really supported the opening of Pharmacy of Grace, and without their help, we wouldn’t be where we are today. Our other avenue is through grants, so we try to make access to medications for our uninsured patients. We go through grant applications and are able to you know meet the needs of what those grants require to support access to medications, access to immunizations. So we have several ways that we get our funding. So individual donors, foundations, grants. We also get patients who support support us through their donor funds. So we we appreciate all the avenues and expertise that have been on our board and in with partners that have helped us. You know, find those avenues and ways to support ourselves.

Ruth Baum Bigus 09:41

Well, I think all of us understand that medications are very expensive. So, how does pharmacy of grace, you know, get medicine, and and how can you discount it?

Michael Fink 09:54

Well, our first way to access medications is a charitable pharmacy. Being a nonprofit, we are available to access medications from an organization out of Nashville, Tennessee. Their name is Dispensary of Hope. They’re another 501c3 organization. Their their work that they do for not only us but other charitable pharmacies across the country is very important to our mission. They go out to the manufacturers of generic medications and brand name medications. By them getting that access for charitable pharmacies and charitable clinics, they provide sources of medications that we only have to pay a yearly fee to access those medications, and that yearly fee is really just to you know help with the organization and their people that are putting that program together. So it’s well worth our while. Over the last four years, I think we’ve spent $50,000 on getting access to that medication, but the return has been well over $2 million of the medications we’ve been able to distribute to the community.

Ruth Baum Bigus 11:18

That’s amazing.

Michael Fink 11:20

Yeah, it was really important for us to partner with that organization and make the medication access in the Kansas City community available.

Ruth Baum Bigus 11:32

Can you walk us through what a patient experiences who’s in that 300% or below poverty level. I’m going to stop there. Can you explain? I mean, I think a lot of people, when you throw out those statistics, what does that mean? Then we’ll go through walking a patient through. I mean, who are we talking about at that that income level? I mean, I think it’s very hard for people to grasp what 300 below the poverty level means.

Michael Fink 12:00

So for an individual, 100% federal poverty level, you’re looking at about $15,000. So if you go up to the 300% poverty level, you’re looking at a patient who makes about $45,000. But then you add a family of four, a family of four at the 100% federal poverty level is just under 230 So you’re talking about a family of four living on $32,000 of income, and some of these medications that are out there that we give them access to, retail price is around $1,000 per month, so you take 12 months of that, and that is just eating away at any income that they’ve, you know, been able to set aside for normal family day living. So you’re talking about patients saying, “Do I want to help my health, or do I put food on on the plates of my family, so we believe that you know we’re taking that cost from $1,000 a month down to a nominal fee of you know $10 or so a month for that person living 100% of the federal poverty level, and making it possible and accessible to them. And then not only that, we don’t just hand it out to them, but we’ll sit down with them and educate them about that medication that may or may not have side effects.

Ruth Baum Bigus 13:32

So again, walking a patient through what’s it like for someone who fits that category when they come to pharmacy of Grace,

Michael Fink 13:44

well, the patients all approach us in different ways. We have some that come to us from the clinic, some that are recently dismissed from the hospital, went to their pharmacy to fill it, find out it’s $400, $1,000, whatever it may be, and they just decide I can’t do it. Somebody refers them on to us, whether that be a social worker or a community health navigator. Somebody is pointing them to us. We don’t have traditional advertising across Kansas City, so when they find us, they’re usually a patient that’s looking for help from somebody else, and that that organization points them toward us. So they may walk in in person, or they first give us a phone call and see see if we can help them. If we can, they will come into the pharmacy. We will you know locate their prescription, bring it into the pharmacy, and then work with them in any way that we can to make it, you know, a sustainable repeating medication that they can continually afford month to month. If we’re only giving them help one time or one month, we don’t don’t see that as successful unless there is a bridge to additional care somewhere else. The traditional patient walks in the door, tells us about their problem. Usually, it is I haven’t been able to afford it. Sometimes it’s I was given this medication or six medications, and I don’t understand any of them. Nobody has had the time to sit down with me. We’ve had it. We’ve had those patients come in where we’ve sat down with them and discussed medications that they have picked up at other pharmacies, or even had to had them sent to them by a mail order. But traditionally, it’s usually the cost they come in. We try to find a way or explain a way that we can make this a sustainable approach. Once their medications are filled, we sit down with them and go over those medications, and then try to get them on an you know an automatic filling behavior, or whatever fits their their daily schedule best. It

Ruth Baum Bigus 16:09

must be a wonderful reaction for a patient to see from a patient once you all have been able to counsel them and understand that they can afford to take something. I would think it’s very frightening if you’ve given medication and all of a sudden go, I can’t take that. I’m not going to get well.

Michael Fink 16:28

Yeah, just as a as a reference point, we had a donor tour that took place one evening, and we put all of our bottles in six or eight different languages, and we had our donors pick up those bottles and ask them, “Would you would you take this medication? Would you go home and just be like, ‘Yeah, I’d take that. Well, they can’t read the bottle; they don’t know what the directions are saying, and that’s often what our patients face if they would be getting their medication written in English, and nobody went over the medication with them. So we just took that opportunity to show our donors what patients that come to us feel like, and they were like, “Yeah, I wouldn’t have taken that medication. It made no sense to me. If you’re telling me that this could have caused like kidney failure. If I’m taking it the wrong way, why would I put that in my body? So it was a great reference point for our donors and for our for our services, our prescription bottles. We’re able to put our our directions in 100 different languages for patients. Wow! And then our interpreters that we use through another local company out of Kansas City called Proprio. We have 300 different languages where we can get an interpreter online, face to face, like a Zoom call or a FaceTime call, but with a professionally trained interpreter, and we’re able to communicate that information to the patient.

Ruth Baum Bigus 18:05

That’s amazing! How wonderful! What a sense of relief for someone whose native language is not English, and then you have medical language, which is confounds a lot of us. So, what a what a cool thing. We’re talking with Dr. Michael Fink. He heads up Pharmacy of Grace. You’ve had some very very exciting developments recently. Share with us location wise.

Michael Fink 18:34

Yeah. So we’ve been in Kansas City, Kansas since 2022. This is our fourth anniversary, July of 2026.

Ruth Baum Bigus 18:42

Congratulations!

Michael Fink 18:44

Thank you. But more importantly, and the exciting news is, we’ve been able to bring Pharmacy of Grace another location in the Kansas City can or in the Kansas City metro area. So Shawnee, Kansas, is where we’ve located our second location, it’s close to the corner of 75th and Quivira in Shawnee, just west down the road from Advent Hospital. So that has opened us up to a community where there is a substantial need of uninsured patients. There’s probably well over 2000 patients that are uninsured in the area, and that was very important to us to find our next location where it made sense to locate where we could serve a high need of patients who are uninsured, and also access to clinical services outside of our medication access.

Ruth Baum Bigus 19:47

So, one of our strategic partners, Mercy and Truth, who we are located in their building in Kansas City, we’ve located at their second location, which is now our second location in Shawnee, Kansas, and just having that accessibility to a clinic that also operates on a sliding scale, whose mission it is to serve the uninsured and underinsured in the community, is important for us. So, as an organization, Pharmacy of Grace is, you know continually looking throughout the Kansas City area, even outside of the metro area. What is the next strategic location that makes sense for us to offer our services at?

Ruth Baum Bigus 20:36

So you’re telling us there may be more locations in the future here.

Michael Fink 20:40

We hope to have more locations in the future for a pharmacy of grace. We’ve been approached from many areas. Leavenworth has been an idea south farther in Olathe, even outside south of Olathe, maybe in the Miami County area, and then of course, Kansas City, Missouri opens up a wide range of people that probably could use our help because we know we have a substantial amount of our patients already coming to us from the Kansas City, Missouri area. But we aren’t to that point yet. But we are always looking forward to how can we expand our services.

Ruth Baum Bigus 21:25

What’s the barrier of just not opening a bunch of other locations

Michael Fink 21:32

besides money? The other the the other barrier is just to make sure there’s sustainability in each pharmacy. We don’t want to drag all of our talent and resources from one area and not have the ability to scale pharmacy of grace, whether that be through donations, grants, or anything else. The board of directors is looking at a way to make pharmacy of grace sustainable in every community we go to, not just a you know a medication access point for three or four years, and we move on. We’re looking at each location to be in that community for the foreseeable future.

Ruth Baum Bigus 22:22

Where is the best place for folks to go find out information about you, or if they could even be a patient?

Michael Fink 22:30

The best place, of course, is we have our social pages, but our our web page is pharmacyofgrace.org, and patients can enroll on there, find our phone number. They they can call us off that page. They will they can call the pharmacy to see how we’re able to assist them. We will direct them to maybe which pharmacy is you know closest to suit their needs and which pharmacy is able to provide the services and counseling they need.

Ruth Baum Bigus 23:07

What What are the things as a nonprofit leader that weigh on your mind or or keep you up at night in doing this really important work?

Michael Fink 23:19

Well, first, it’s the patients to make sure we’re able to help those patients. Like I said, we want this to be sustainable. We don’t want to give them a false sense of security, like well, this this organization is only going to be around five years. You know, we’ve seen something like this before, where an organization comes along and then the funds dry up and the organization isn’t able to help them anymore. Sadly, we’ve seen that with organizations in the last five years where that’s happened, where funding just isn’t available. The next thing is we don’t have stockholders, but we do have, you know, funders of our organization. We want to spend their money appropriately and in a way that we say we’re going to help the community. So every every dollar we take in, we’re looking to, you know, make sure we can explain that dollar, how it was spent, and really how it goes on to benefit those patient needs and patient services that we’ve really promised them that we would be serving.

Ruth Baum Bigus 24:32

And it seems like collaboration is a big part of your model. Can you talk a little bit about that and and how you carve those or create those Relationships,

Michael Fink 24:41

sure. So we work with the hospitals around the area. We have you know accounts that we can use with them to bridge that care. So we’ve worked with Advent. We’ve worked with KU. They have a program called J Dot where their medical students go into a clinic. They see the homeless, the uninsured, the underinsured, and they send prescriptions our way for those patients who just don’t have an access or a way to afford those medications. We work with clinics in the area, as I stated. Mercy and Truth is the building we’re located in, and that strategic partner gives us access to medications through a federal program called 340B. So Mercy and Truth owns the medications we’re just distributing for them. And then we also work with other FQHCs in the area that send us their patients just based out of location and need for that patient to find a local pharmacy if they don’t have the ability to travel 10 or 15 miles to get their medications, we provide another resource to those FQHCs to give those patients access to a pharmacy that’s able to help them out as well through charitable meds and through meds that are nominally priced.

Ruth Baum Bigus 26:09

Okay, what’s an FQHC?

Michael Fink 26:12

FQHCs are federally qualified health clinics. Okay, and then Ku, like I mentioned, they’re a they’re serving a a community of patients that just don’t have the funds, so they’re a disport a disproportionate share hospital. So they have access to 340 B medications, but those are the organizations we’re out there looking to partner with all the time. How can we help their patients and also serve the needs of patients who may be moving to us for that care? That’s that’s information we have to share all the time, even with KU. Like we aren’t their 340B Pharmacy, but we’re able to help them in other ways, we would love to be able to partner with them and be a 340 B pharmacy for them. But you know, there’s a there’s a huge structure there of of you know bureaucracy that we would have to work through to be part of that. But we think over time, as stuff you know progresses, that we probably will be a 340 B partner with a lot of other hospitals or organizations in the Kansas City area, and we are just trying to promote to those organizations how we can help their patients as well.

Ruth Baum Bigus 27:40

Well, we congratulate you on this growth and this opening of a second location to help more people. And we would just encourage our audience go to pharmacyofgrace.org. You can support them. You can learn about them. They can become your pharmacy. So check it out, Dr. Fink. Thank you so much for spending time with us and and sharing the very latest on what’s going on with Pharmacy of Grace,

Michael Fink 28:07

thank you very much. I appreciated the opportunity to share that information with you.

Ruth Baum Bigus 28:12

And thank you for joining us on KC Cares, Kansas City’s nonprofit voice. We’re produced by a nonprofit called Charitable Communications. This KC Cares segment was brought to you by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. www.kopman.org. Now, if you’d like to be a guest on Casey Cares or learn more about what we do, go to our website kcaresonline.org and spread the love. We’re on Facebook and Twitter at kcaresradio and on Instagram at Casey Cares Online. Also check us out on LinkedIn and catch us on Saturday mornings at eight a.m. on ESPN, 1510 a.m. and 94.5 FM. Thanks for joining us on KC Cares.