Talk to Your Pharmacist

In this episode, our guest is Sam Libby, President and Managing Director of TCB Capital Advisors. Sam's long-standing career in healthcare investment banking has seen him lead over 30 impactful transactions, totaling more than $20 billion. His dedication to healthcare is rooted in a personal connection, being the son of two therapists, which has given him a unique understanding of the sector's challenges, particularly around patient access and care quality.

As co-founder of TCB Capital Advisors, Sam focuses on empowering forward-thinking healthcare companies. His work spans partnerships with companies in oncology, neurodegenerative diseases, women's health, and digital health, helping to steer innovations that profoundly improve patient outcomes. 

Sam, welcome to the Talk to Your Pharmacist podcast. Now that our listeners have heard a bit about your background maybe you can fill in any gaps to that intro and share a bit about your personal life.

Topics to discuss –

Background & Career

1. Sam, you’ve had an incredibly successful career in healthcare investment banking, leading over 30 transactions totaling more than $20 billion. Can you walk us through how you first became interested in the healthcare sector, and how your upbringing as the son of two therapists shaped your perspective on healthcare?
2. As co-founder of TCB Capital Advisors, how did you identify the unique opportunity to focus specifically on healthcare companies? What challenges did you face in the early days of building your firm?

Healthcare Investment Landscape

1. You've been involved in transactions across diverse areas, such as oncology, neurodegenerative diseases, women’s health, and digital health. How do you assess which healthcare innovations and companies are worth investing in? What are some key trends you’re seeing in these sectors today?
2. Healthcare investment banking involves navigating both financial and clinical challenges. How do you balance the business side of healthcare with the real-world impact on patient access and care quality?
3. You’ve been part of some transformative partnerships in healthcare. Can you share a specific example of a partnership that particularly stands out to you, both in terms of financial success and its impact on patient outcomes?

Healthcare Innovation & Strategy

1. With your experience empowering forward-thinking healthcare companies, how do you foresee digital health and technology playing a larger role in the future of patient care? What do you think are the biggest opportunities and challenges?
2. Women’s health is one of the key sectors you’ve focused on. What are some innovations or initiatives you’ve seen that are making a real difference for women’s healthcare, and how can investors further support these efforts?
3. In your opinion, what role does patient access play in the broader healthcare investment landscape? How can companies balance innovation with the need to make these innovations accessible to all patients, especially underserved populations?

Financial Strategies & Healthcare Companies

1. Healthcare investments often involve complex financial strategies. For our audience who might not be familiar with the intricacies of healthcare investment banking, can you explain how financial strategies differ when working with healthcare companies as opposed to other industries?
2. As a leader in healthcare investment banking, how do you guide companies through challenges like market volatility, regulatory hurdles, and competition in their efforts to innovate and grow? Are there any specific strategies you use to help them thrive?

Future Outlook

1. You’ve helped shape the growth of companies across a wide range of therapeutic areas. Looking ahead, what sectors or healthcare innovations do you believe have the most potential to revolutionize patient outcomes in the next 5 to 10 years?
2. As someone deeply involved in healthcare strategy and innovation, what advice would you give to young entrepreneurs or companies just starting to navigate the healthcare sector? What are the key lessons you’ve learned along the way?
3. Lastly, what excites you most about the future of healthcare, and where do you see the biggest areas for disruption and opportunity?

Guest - Sam Libby, TCB Capital Advisors

Host - Hillary Blackburn, PharmD, MBA

In this episode:
 Randy Lipps is Chairman, President, Chief Executive Officer, and Founder of Omnicell, a leader in transforming the pharmacy care delivery model. Under his leadership, Omnicell has grown from a single product offering to delivering the most comprehensive portfolio of medication management solutions across the continuum of care.

• Mr. Lipps founded Omnicell in 1992 after observing how inefficiently medical supplies were managed when his daughter was hospitalized at birth. Inspired by his work in airline industry operations and logistics, he sought to enable better management of supplies and medications to help improve patient care.
• Omnicell became a publicly traded company in August 2001, and today healthcare systems worldwide leverage the company’s automation and advanced services offerings to maximize clinical and operational outcomes.
• In 2014 Mr. Lipps was elected to the Bellwether League Hall of Fame, an industry organization that honors healthcare supply chain innovators, pioneers, and visionaries.
• Mr. Lipps has made giving back to the community a priority at Omnicell. Omnicell Cares, the company’s formalized charitable efforts program, translates this into action, making a positive difference by fostering opportunities for volunteerism, charitable giving, and raising awareness for critical topics and issues. Mr. Lipps and his wife, Kathy, have focused their own philanthropy on poverty, nursing and public education, pharmacy research, youth groups, and local community efforts. Mr. Lipps serves as a member of the Board of Trustees of the American Nurses Foundation.
• Prior to founding Omnicell, Mr. Lipps was Assistant Vice President of Sales and Operations for a division of American Airlines. He holds Bachelor degrees in both Economics and Business Administration from Southern Methodist University.

Topics to discuss –

• Introduction to Randy and Omnicell and his journey leading the digital transformation of medication management 
• Staffing shortages and employee retention are top problems facing employers today, especially hospitals and health systems. In the pharmacy, labor shortages have far-reaching impacts including reduced quality of patient care, increased workloads for staff, slow delivery of medications, growing operational costs and process inefficiencies that lead to medication errors. Automation for pharmacies could be the key to addressing these issues and optimizing hospital staff’s efficiency to reduce labor gaps.
• How the Innovation Lab allows customers to get a firsthand look at how automation technologies can make their healthcare operations more efficient and enable nurses and pharmacists to spend more time caring for patients. 
• The autonomous pharmacy vision. How pharmacy automation reduces medication errors through accurate dispensing, streamlines inventory management and real-time tracking, ensures controlled substance security and regulatory compliance, and gives nurses more time to focus on higher-value tasks that directly impact patient care.

Guest - Randall Lipps is Chairman, President, Chief Executive Officer, and Founder of Omnicell

Social Media:

In this episode, our guest is Srulik Dvorsky, who is the co-founder and CEO of TailorMed. Drawing on his experiences caring for family members with cancer—and his background as a technological leader in the medical device space—he started TailorMed with a mission to remove barriers to care. Now the market’s category leader, TailorMed offers the nation’s largest affordability network spanning more than

800 hospitals, 1,300 clinics, and 1,400 pharmacies, as well as premier life science companies. Under Srulik’s leadership, TailorMed has received broad recognition for its impact and innovation, including Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 list and the New York Digital Health 100 list for three consecutive years. He holds a global MBA from the Arison School of Business at Reichman University and a BSc in electrical engineering from Tel Aviv University.

Topics to discuss –

1. Background on TailorMed, its mission, and its role for bringing down the cost of care for patients

Founding of TailorMed: After caring for several family members with cancer, Srulik

wanted to leverage his expertise in technology to help solve a critical challenge in healthcare. He co-founded TailorMed in 2018 with a mission to help patients overcome barriers to care.

2. Problem Overview: Affordability in Healthcare / Specialty Care:

Rising medication costs lead many patients, particularly those who require specialty care, to delay or forgo therapy. About 1 in 5 U.S. adults says they have not filled a prescription, while 1 in 10 has cut pills in half or skipped doses in the last year,

due to cost. This leads to higher rates of prescription abandonment and loss

of revenue for pharmacies–and poor adherence and worse

outcomes for patients.

3. How TailorMed Partners with Pharmacies:

There is an abundance of financial assistance to help patients afford their medications, amounting to over $50 billion in total. These resources are underutilized because pharmacies and providers often lack a proactive approach to identify patients in

need and efficiently match them with assistance programs. TailorMed enables pharmacies and providers to flag financially at-risk patients and streamline program matching and enrollment. TailorMed began with provider partners and expanded to include top specialty pharmacies, infusion centers, and life science companies—building the nation’s largest affordability network.

4. Key Considerations for Pharmacy Teams Tackling Medication

Affordability:

Streamline financial assistance workflows to proactively address cost barriers at scale.

Embed affordability solutions into day-to-day operations to reduce administrative burden.

Use data and automation to boost efficiency and support better patient outcomes.

Prioritize change management and IT collaboration to ensure smooth adoption and long-term success of tech-driven solutions. Track both clinical and financial impact to refine your approach

and promote best practices.

Guest - Srulik Dvorsky, MBA

In this episode, our guest is Heidi Steinecker, DrPH & Principal of Health & Human Services Consulting at Resultant. With over two decades of leadership in public health and healthcare systems—including as Deputy Director of the California Department of Public Health—Heidi is helping states transform how they use data to prevent crises and protect vulnerable communities.

Heidi takes complex public health challenges and breaks them down into clear, data-driven strategies that work. She’s spent her career modernizing outdated systems, leading emergency responses, and designing early intervention models that save lives. Today at Resultant—recently named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies of 2025—Heidi is focused on helping agencies turn massive amounts of public health data into actionable, equitable solutions.

Heidi, welcome to the Talk to Your Pharmacist podcast. Now that our listeners have heard a bit about your background maybe you can fill in any gaps to that intro and share a bit about your personal life.

Topics to discuss --

• How public health agencies can move from reactive to proactive using predictive analytics
• Why modernizing health data systems is no longer optional—and how to get started

From Classroom to Policy Leadership – before becoming California’s Deputy Director of Public Health during the COVID‑19 pandemic
How did your early experiences in teaching inform your approach to leadership and communication during a public health crisis?

Leading Transformation at Scale – At CDPH, you transformed manual inspection systems into proactive, cloud‑based predictive models
Can you discuss a specific challenge you faced transitioning these systems, and how you overcame resistance to change?

Bridging Local and Global Health – Your doctoral work at MCW focused on infectious diseases in high-risk settings and you emphasize “local health is global health”
How do you translate lessons learned in global health contexts to strengthen health systems here in the U.S.?

Modernizing Public Health Infrastructure – In a recent podcast, you emphasized that modernization starts with relationships—combined with tech like AI and predictive analytics.What are the critical steps to building both the relational and technical foundations needed for effective public health modernization?

Guest - Heidi Steinecker

In this episode, our guest is Lewis Bender, Chairman, and CEO, of Intensity Therapeutics’ Founder which is a late-stage clinical biotechnology company whose mission is to help patients live longer, higher quality lives by discovering, developing, and commercializing first-in-class cancer drugs that attenuate tumors with minimal side effects, while training the patient’s immune system to fight the cancer.  The Company’s lead product candidate, INT230-6, is currently in human clinical studies to treat refractory solid tumors.

Talking points:
Milestone Achievement: "Congratulations on dosing the first patient in the INVINCIBLE-4 Phase 2 clinical trial for triple-negative breast cancer. Can you walk us through the significance of this milestone and what it means for the future of Intensity Therapeutics?"

Innovative Approach of INT230-6: "Intensity Therapeutics focuses on developing cancer treatments that not only attenuate tumors with minimal side effects but also train the immune system to fight cancer. Could you explain how your lead product, INT230-6, achieves this unique approach and what differentiates it from existing cancer therapies?"

Collaboration with SAKK: "Your partnership with The Swiss Group for Clinical Cancer Research (SAKK) is a key component of the INVINCIBLE-4 study. How does this collaboration enhance your clinical development efforts, and what are you hoping to achieve together in this trial?"

Impact on Triple-Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC): "Triple-negative breast cancer is known for being particularly aggressive and having limited treatment options. How does INT230-6 address the unmet needs of TNBC patients, and what potential impact do you foresee it having on improving patient outcomes?"

Future Vision and Next Steps: "Looking ahead, what are the next steps for Intensity Therapeutics following the initiation of the INVINCIBLE-4 study? How do you envision the future of your company in the evolving landscape of cancer therapeutics?"

Guest - Lewis Bender

Host - Hillary Blackburn, PharmD, MBA