OHIO professor’s nonprofit pharmacy delivers life-saving medications with life-changing savings

Rising Suns Pharmacy is quietly changing and saving lives in southeast Ohio. The Athens, Ohio-based nonprofit pharmacy helps manage medications for people in the area that are uninsured and underinsured. To date, Rising Suns has proudly served more than 1,000 patients and delivered more than $8 million in medication savings.

But Rising Suns is more than just a traditional pharmacy. Beyond delivering life-saving medications to patients at no cost, the humble pharmacy also provides a true sense of community. The friendly atmosphere, and close-knit, small-town pharmacist to patient relationships found there harken back to olden days.

This positive energy surrounding Rising Suns is thanks in no small part to its founder, Ohio University Associate Clinical Professor Sarah Adkins, Pharm. D. Through sheer persistence and willpower Adkins founded Rising Suns in 2019 and opened its doors in 2021. Today, she remains the heart and soul of the operation, donating her time and expertise to provide the southeast Ohio community with medicine and care. 

On top of her work at Rising Suns, Adkins teaches pharmacology and other pharmacy-related courses at OHIO’s Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine to provide future doctors with a clinical awareness of the discipline. Many of her students also volunteer at the nonprofit pharmacy.

Rising Suns’ main goal is to provide access to medications and resources to help patients live their healthiest, happiest lives. To receive care, patients must be uninsured, without prescription drug coverage or unable to afford prescription co-payments. They must also reside in Athens County or the six adjacent counties: Morgan, Washington, Perry, Meigs, Hocking and Vinton. Adkins estimates that around 70% of her patients are from Athens County. 

Upon driving through the Athens County Fairgrounds entrance on West Union Street and walking into Rising Suns’ second-floor building atop the Athens City-County Health Department, the scene can appear quite chaotic. You’ll see rows and rows of medications; boxes covering the floor and stacked upon shelves; and pharmacists, technicians and volunteers busy organizing medications, counting pills, answering the phones and speaking with patients.

“Our phones ring off the hook,” emphasized Adkins. “We have four phones and oftentimes all four are in use.”

The constant stream of patient phone calls is a testament to the work the team at Rising Suns does to go above and beyond. Patients are not only provided with medications, but any support they may need. Rising Suns takes care to include “social determinants of health” questions on their patient screenings to holistically address the health of their clients. If a patient has a food or transportation need, for example, Rising Suns will connect them with a local food pantry or Hocking Athens Perry Community Action Programs.

“Part of the goal of the pharmacy is to truly break down all the barriers,” said Adkins. “Ohio University offers the free Heritage Community Clinic, which is super great, but I thought they need a free pharmacy in addition to this. They need a charitable pharmacy because people could get their care for no charge, but they couldn’t get their medications for free.”

In addition to Adkins and a troop of volunteers, the pharmacy is supported by highly regarded pharmacist Hayley Sowers-Huner, Pharm. D., and Divya Yellamraju, a dedicated technician and office manager. Community members who utilize Rising Suns’ services can feel the thought and consideration that goes into their care. Kenneth Gabriel is a retired Athens County resident who has been getting his medications at Rising Suns Pharmacy for several months. Gabriel is a talkative, vibrant man full of stories that he wasn’t shy about telling in the Rising Suns waiting area. While conversing, he also expressed his gratitude for the nonprofit pharmacy.

“Rising Suns does a lot of good work with lower income people,” said Gabriel. “It’s easy access and the people there are genuinely caring about your health.”

The depth of care patients receive starts with Adkins. She very intentionally creates a welcoming, down-to-earth atmosphere where everyone knows each other. Adkins doesn’t wear her white coat and instead opts for a t-shirt or sweater to drive home the fact that everyone in her pharmacy is on an equal playing field.

“I love getting to know my patients, I love getting to know their lives,” emphasized Adkins. “I also think that trust is something that we don’t have a lot of in the world. So, if I can do one thing to ease the stress in their lives of course I’ll do that.”

A vast majority of the medications distributed by Rising Suns are donated. Around 80% are repository drugs—unused, unexpired and sealed medications from hospitals, nursing homes and other facilities. The repository drugs are received in large boxes through a “lottery-style” system and require careful sorting, which is a large task for a small operation like Rising Suns.

“People want to help go through the boxes,” said Adkins. “But unless you’re a pharmacist [or in the medical field] you have no idea what you’re looking at.”

In addition to repository meds, the nonprofit pharmacy receives insulin and other life-saving diabetes and glycemic control medications like Trulicity from Dispensary of Hope, a charitable medication distributor based in Nashville, Tenn. Rising Suns pays an annual membership free of around $12,500 for all the insulin and related drugs that patients need.

Ruth and Alvin McDaniel live in nearby Guysville, Ohio, and recently started going to Rising Suns. The couple rely on the nonprofit pharmacy for their diabetes medications and are extremely thankful that they are able to get life-saving medications at zero cost.

“Rising Suns got Trulicity for me,” said Ruth McDaniel. “It would have been $3,600 for three months and they gave it to me for free. They do like donations – they don’t press you for it.”

“But we’re going to donate,” added Alvin McDaniel.

The nonprofit also purchases specific medications that aren’t often found in the repository packages, but these total purchases only amount to around $10,000 per year. Adkins said that if there is something that someone needs and we can purchase it for fairly cheap, we will absolutely do that.

“I wanted to do it for my community,” Adkins said. “It’s helping so many people; we save lives. We literally save lives every day.”

Mia Maiden is yet another patient Rising Suns has helped. Maiden is in her 20s and moved to the Athens area from Essex, England, to be with her husband who was raised in nearby Chauncey, Ohio. Coming from another country, Maiden had concerns about the U.S. health care system, concerns that the nonprofit pharmacy was able to ease.

“[Rising Suns] is extremely beneficial. I’m not used to paying for medicine at all,” said Maiden. “In the UK it’s free but you have to wait for a long time. In America, I was really scared about how much I’d have to pay.”

A southeast Ohio native, Adkins’ passion for helping people from the region has deep roots. She was born at nearby O’Bleness hospital and went to Alexander and then Athens City Schools, and now, she takes great pride in helping care for the community she grew up in.

Adkins said she knew that she was going to be a pharmacist from a young age. She witnessed the power of health care and medicine early on when her family was in and out of medical facilities and pharmacies dealing with her sister’s diagnosis of idiopathic glomerulonephritis—an inflammation of the kidneys for an unknown reason.

“Since the second grade, I was set that I was going to be a pharmacist,” Adkins said. “And it never changed even through the time I graduated high school. Even when I had graduated high school, I was already looking at pharmacy schools.”

Logically, Adkins went to school for pharmacy, earning a Bachelor of Science in Pharmacy from the University of Toledo. Soon after, she worked in Columbus as a pharmacy benefits manager with Medco Health Solutions and began serving the public. It was there that she first discovered her love of teaching.

“I decided I wanted to teach,” she said. “There were a lot of students who shadowed me when I worked at Medco, and I loved teaching. I loved having students. So, I thought, you know what, I need to go back to get my doctorate so I can teach.”

To pursue this passion, Adkins juggled working full time and raising two children while attending Ohio State University’s College of Pharmacy. It took her around three years to get her Pharm. D. This is also where Adkins first came across the concept of a nonprofit pharmacy—a discovery that would later pave the way for Rising Suns.

“Before I graduated with my Pharm. D, a nonprofit pharmacy had opened in Columbus called the Charitable Pharmacy and I got to tour that as a student, and it was amazing,” she said. “I thought southeast Ohio needs one of these so badly.”

Just months after earning her doctorate, Adkins’ world was turned upside down in an unthinkable way. She lost her family in a tragic, life-altering event that left her seeking a safe place. She returned home to Athens where she found solace in teaching.

Ohio State offered her a part-time, PGY1 residency position working in Ohio University’s Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine (HCOM). Adkins describes it as a collaboration between OSU’s College of Pharmacy and HCOM. This role quickly evolved into a full-time opportunity where Adkins worked collaboratively between the two institutions for more than 10 years.

As she lived and worked in Athens, Adkins couldn’t shake the idea of a southeast Ohio nonprofit pharmacy. She started trying to open a nonprofit pharmacy back in 2011, but it wasn’t until 2021 that her vision was finally realized with collaboration from area physicians.

Years before Rising Suns Pharmacy was founded, Adkins began living out her other passion: teaching. As an Associate Clinical Professor in OHIO’s Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine (HCOM) she teaches pharmacology courses where she educates future doctors and other health care professionals about the role of pharmacy, drugs costs and how to address rural health care and pharmacy deserts.

There is no formal connection between Rising Suns Pharmacy and Ohio University but as the founder of Rising Suns and a clinical professor with HCOM, Adkins effectively bridges the two worlds. Dozens of medical students at HCOM, as well as OHIO nursing and social work students, volunteer at the pharmacy and are provided with extensive hands-on learning working directly with patients and logging and sorting medications. Adkins said the medical students have been incredibly helpful.

“There is no pharmacy school at Ohio University, and students need to know what the pharmacy profession looks like,” said Adkins. “Even if they could spend just a day to come through the pharmacy and talk about the pharmacy and the medications and the cost and how drug distribution works, that was my ultimate goal.”

Samuel Frank, a first-year medical student at HCOM who volunteers at Rising Suns and serves on the pharmacy’s executive board for medical student volunteers has also been fortunate to have Adkins as a professor.

“I knew right away that she embodied all the same values I have about medicine and patients,” said Frank. “That really motivated me, not only Rising Suns’ mission but hearing Doctor Adkins share her story and why she started the pharmacy. That’s when I got interested, and as soon as I started working there, I knew that it was somewhere I was going to be spending a lot of my time.”

Like Adkins, Frank enjoys working directly with patients and after his time at HCOM, he said he wants to be a front-facing physician interacting with patients possibly in emergency medicine. Frank’s volunteer experience at Rising Suns is providing those patient interactions crucial to his learning.

“The people who are putting in the time to volunteer, they’re not just helping, but they’re also getting that benefit of learning,” Frank said. “Most of the time I am primarily doing patient interaction, whether that’s helping individuals check out up front and get their medications or discussing eligibility paperwork with patients over the phone or in person, that has been extremely meaningful, because I’m not only getting the pharmaceutical knowledge and background from this experience, but I’m also getting to speak with patients.”

Giving students like Frank an awareness of the pharmacy profession is one of Adkins’ missions as an educator.

“What I try to bring to them is clinical awareness of pharmacy and pharmacists,” she said. “I try to give them a sense of what the pharmacy profession looks like, and how physicians can interact with pharmacists and what that looks like. Interprofessional.”

In addition to her duties as a professor and pharmacist, Adkins does small group coaching for HCOM students, conducts Interprofessional Education Simulation Events focused on team-based care and is spearheading a Medicaid grant-funded Quality Improvement Project (QIP) working with primary care offices to decrease the A1C and ease the burden on patients with diabetes across the southeast Ohio region. The QIP is a hub and spoke model with HCOM acting as the hub and clinical practice sites as spokes.

Sabreena Ighneim is also a first-year medical student at the Heritage College who has both had Adkins as a professor and volunteers at Rising Suns. She also serves on the pharmacy’s executive board for medical student volunteers. Ighneim is hoping to work in surgery upon graduating, and she is extremely passionate about health literacy and goes above and beyond to treat the underserved, advocate for her patients and ensure that they truly understand their conditions.

“I love working with patients and connecting them with resources that maybe they didn’t have or know about,” Ighneim said.” When I’m on the phone with them, they’ll go down these rabbit holes and I feel genuinely appreciated when a patient feels comfortable enough to open up like that.”

Ighneim met Adkins during her second day of orientation as a medical student and immediately gravitated toward her positive energy. Ighneim said Adkins sat down and began chatting with her and a group of students and they soon found out she was their professor and small group coach.

“She’s great. She’s very helpful and supportive. As the small group coach, she wants to support everyone’s goals,” emphasized Ighneim. “Doctor Adkins keeps it light-hearted at the pharmacy even during stressful situations. She’s really great about answering questions and just being kind. She’s also super great with the patients.”

Adkins had clearly made a massive impression on both the southeast Ohio community and Ohio University students through her work at Rising Suns Pharmacy, but she said the way the pharmacy currently operates is not sustainable. 

Despite all of the incredible community support, the nonprofit pharmacy is at a bit of tipping point. Adkins said Rising Suns is being utilized by so many people that it is growing—which she acknowledges is a great thing, but in order to sustain that growth and continue serving the community effectively the nonprofit needs more funding.

“I think it’s all very good, but it just can’t operate any longer how it’s been operated. It can’t be a mom-and-pop kind of place where we’re just doing our very best. It needs to operate like a real business. We need the structure of a business. We need to hire an executive director, but we need funding for that.”

There are some potential solutions on the horizon. Adkins said Rising Suns is currently working to connect with other larger charitable pharmacies with more infrastructure, including dispensing sites that would save the nonprofit pharmacy the time of sorting through thousands of repository medications and allow them to order the medications their patients need more effectively.

Whatever the future holds, one thing can be certain, Adkins will continue fighting to serve the people of southeast Ohio and mentor the next generation of compassionate medical professionals.

“Health care is not a privilege it’s a right and we are not reflecting that in our world today,” she said. “I want to make it a right. It should be their right to have medications and just because they can’t afford it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be able to take care of themselves. It’s not fair.”