Welcome to April. Looking back at the first quarter of 2012, we can see significant activity and accomplishment. PFOA revenues and rebates are up dramatically – over $1,200,000 in March 2012 compared to less than $300,000 for the same period last year.

PFOA has joined CFA (Coalition of Franchisee Associations) to assist in better promoting franchise interests. If you have not yet looked at their website to see how their efforts can benefit our organization, please take a moment to visit at www.thecfainc.com

We have joined RxAlly, an organization dedicated to better serving pharmacies and pharmacists, the patients they serve and the payer community. We are making preparation to sign our membership up for this program. We continue to monitor the progress of this very unique alliance.

Larry McIntosh, Todd Pendergraft and I participated in the Federation of Pharmacy Networks (FPN) annual meeting in Clearwater, Florida which allowed us to network with other groups and add vendors.

PFOA is involved in a joint venture developing a PBM which should allow us to pursue local small business in our members’ trading areas. Larry McIntosh and Don Schreiber recently met with another PBM alternative that might well provide us some quicker solutions in development of our efforts. The PBM development group will be meeting in St. Louis this month to put together RFP for needed back end services next week.

We continue to add membership to the Cardinal AAP program and have made some quality presentations for the ABC program.

With the FTC approval of the Express Scripts/Medco merger after eight months of review and numerous objections we are left to wonder about the impact on our membership’s businesses. It was a 3 to 1 split vote. NCPA has filed a legal challenge and pooled their efforts with NACDS on this issue. The two trade groups noted 76 members of congress wrote the FTC to raise concerns and more than 30 states attorneys general are also investigating competitive issues. This highlights the importance of improving purchasing and operating efficiencies of our members’ businesses. It underlines Independent Pharmacy’s need to support a group like NCPA that can represent them on a national stage. It highlights the need for an RxAlly type of program’s success and the need to mine our local area for other business opportunities.

McEwan Media Marketing continues to assist us in weekly publication on our website and has produced our latest newsletter. We even have web results on who has read the on line newsletter and how long they looked it over.