Embracing Pharmacy as a Community

Written by: Christianna McCausland, published in the Capsule, Winter 2025

For Brian Hose, PharmD ’06, a career in independent community pharmacy was decided by a simple interaction between a pharmacist and a family member.

“My grandfather was getting older and having some health issues. A local pharmacist went out of his way to put him in touch with Veterans Affairs to make sure he could get his prescriptions at a much more reasonable rate; otherwise he couldn’t afford them,” Hose explains. “It really opened my eyes to the impact a person like that could have on a community and an individual.”

That “light bulb” moment set Hose on a path not only to pharmacy school but to a career-long commitment to independent community pharmacy. As a student at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, Hose realized he wanted to be an independent community pharmacy owner. Relationships he built with owners through the School’s student chapter of the National Community Pharmacists Association helped him move toward that goal. After working for two years following graduation, he purchased Sharpsburg Pharmacy in 2008 where he continues to model the positive practices of his mentors.

“The best independent owners put their community and its needs first,” he says. “As long as you try to focus on benefits for patients it’s easy for the community to support you and help you grow that business.”

Hose has been an advocate for his profession, chairing the Maryland Pharmacy Coalition and holding many positions with the Maryland Pharmacists Association, including president. He’s also a past president of the School of Pharmacy’s Alumni Association and has been active lobbying for legislation to advance pharmacy practice, starting early in his career advocating for immunization authority. He received special training in diabetes counseling from the School’s P3 Program and has been certified to provide vaccinations in Maryland since 2006. More recently, his legislative agenda has focused on pharmacy benefit management (PBM) reform.

EPIC Rx is one of the nation’s largest Pharmacy Services Administrative Organizations and buying groups and is owned and operated by its members. As both a pharmacy owner through EPIC Rx since 2008 and an active participant in professional associations, Hose naturally gravitated to EPIC Rx’s political action committee, which he eventually ran before serving on EPIC’s board of directors. In 2022, he became EPIC Rx’s president and CEO, a full-time post.

He splits his time between EPIC’s headquarters near Richmond, Va., and his pharmacy in Maryland, which his team of pharmacists and technicians keep running smoothly. Hose says the opportunity to oversee EPIC allows him to make a bigger impact on community pharmacy than he could from his home pharmacy in Sharpsburg. “This is a way to influence a hundred communities or a thousand instead of just one.”

Hose states that in addition to “a world-class education,” the School of Pharmacy helped give him confidence to seek bigger and more involved roles after graduating. “The leadership experience I got at the School early on is really what separated me from working at a pharmacy to being a leader within pharmacy,” he says, noting that he was president of the School’s Student Government Association and worked with numerous organizations and committees. “Each student organization is a tiny incubator for a leader.”

Hose’s leadership capabilities and the many relationships he’s built through professional organizations are proving worthwhile as he tackles the challenges that face independent community pharmacies. A small number of vertically integrated companies control a large share of the market, but with PBM reform and the natural resiliency of the industry, Hose is hopeful for the future.

“Often, when you are calling the pharmacy, you are having the worst day of your life; you don’t want to be another number that gets told you have to come back in 48 hours,” he says. “The personalized service at independent community pharmacies is what you would want for your mother, your grandmother, or another family member, especially when the question is one that could be life or death.”