Alum Alex Yampolsky turned his career in pharmacy into an entrepreneurial adventure

By Archer Parquette

Alex Yampolsky’s (PharmD ’08) grandparents helped shape his career. Yampolsky, whose family immigrated to Shorewood, Wisconsin, from Ukraine when he was 13, watched his grandparents struggle at their local chain pharmacy. The pharmacists didn’t know them, the care was cookie-cutter, and at their age it was getting harder to make informed decisions.

“They needed help — I did a lot of handholding for them with their doctor and their pharmacy,” says Yampolsky, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Pharmacy. “My grandparents were at the core of what I was trying to do with my business. At the root of it all was good patient care, the kind that my grandparents deserved.”

In 2018, a year after earning his MBA at UW–Madison, Yampolsky co-founded Vytal Health with Tiffany Mullen. Yampolsky’s original vision for the Milwaukee-based startup was called Pharmacy of Tomorrow — his plan was to create responsive community pharmacies that met the needs of patients like his grandparents. But with time, his vision for the company evolved.

“Health care is fundamentally broken,” Yampolsky says. “A pharmacist has to fill 600 prescriptions; a physician has to see 20 patients a day. Providers are often too busy to ask the question ‘why?’ Patients end up with a backpack full of prescriptions for things that have root causes nobody addressed.”

“My grandparents were at the core of what I was trying to do with my business. At the root of it all was good patient care, the kind that my grandparents deserved.”
—Alex Yampolsky

Vytal Health’s focus shifted toward integrative and functional medicine, attempting to address those root causes. The startup connects patients with physicians who provide personalized treatment plans that address underlying issues such as nutrition and lifestyle. Vytal Health now provides telehealth services to patients nationwide.

In 2022, after four years with his successful startup, Yampolsky stepped back from the business and took on a new challenge as CEO of MedServe, a company combatting drug diversion.

But two decades ago, before his unlikely foray into the world of entrepreneurship, Yampolsky’s career began with a compromise.  

Falling in love with pharmacy

“I wasn’t interested in pharmacy before I went into pharmacy school,” Yampolsky says. “I did it because it was something between being a lawyer and a doctor that paid good money, and I could actually see myself doing it.”

He started his education at UW–Milwaukee before transferring to the UW–Madison to attend the School of Pharmacy. A clinical rotation at Aurora Health Care opened his eyes to the many roles pharmacists hold and ignited his passion for the field.

“I fell in love with it,” he says. “I could see how pharmacists play a role in the entire clinical ecosystem. There was an opportunity to get more involved and do more, and that became a huge passion of mine, to empower other pharmacists.”

After graduation, Yampolsky became a clinic pharmacist with Aurora, where he worked until 2015, eventually becoming director of pharmacy operations in Milwaukee, overseeing over 30 pharmacy locations. He also helped expand Aurora’s nascent telehealth services, a virtual option that would pay dividends in 2020. At the time, he saw it as a way to give underserved patients in rural areas or with other barriers access to the quality of care his pharmacists provided.

Yampolsky was thriving within the traditional career path of a pharmacist, but he was starting to feel an itch to make a change.

“Pharmacists are on the front lines of health care. We see that around every corner in health care, there’s a problem,” he says. “Somebody has to fix it, and if we don’t fix it, it’s going to be somebody from Silicon Valley who has no health care experience.”

Yampolsky began to consider how he might be able to fix some of those problems he saw in health care. And he decided that the first step to make that happen was to return to Madison.

Building a network — and a company

Yampolsky’s first attempt at networking was a waste of time. While working at Aurora, he attended a clinic opening with businesspeople, marketers and doctors, the only pharmacist in the room. Instead of schmoozing, he stood in the corner, clutching his beer, and then left without making any connections. 

When he enrolled in UW–Madison’s Master of Business Administration program in 2015, he was immediately thrown headfirst into dozens of networking events, and with the support of the program behind him, he learned how to handle them. 

“I was meeting people in the business community who were successful — and they weren’t the type of people I thought were in startups,” Yampolsky says. “I thought they were going to be people from Wall Street, rich people, or Silicon Valley types. These were normal Midwestern people doing cool stuff. It was very empowering for me. It gave me the confidence to say, ‘If they can do it, why can’t I?’”

Spurred by those frustrating experiences with his grandparents, Yampolsky began working on ideas for what would become Vytal Health while still studying for his MBA. A year after graduating, he officially co-founded the burgeoning startup and took on the role of chief operating officer.

On a subscription-based telehealth model, Vytal Health offers patients more time and attention from their physicians and personalized health plans. The approach proved popular, especially when the COVID pandemic increased the use of telehealth services, and the company grew dramatically.

“When you found a startup, you are drinking out of a firehose nonstop,” he says. “You wear a million hats. You’re moving really fast. You’re adjusting your service on the fly, and it feels like you’re meeting your customers’ needs a lot more directly, which makes you feel happy about what you’re doing.”

The next chapter

In 2022, seeking a change of pace, Yampolsky stepped back from Vytal Health. His learned affinity for networking led him to Matt Cordio, the president and COO of MedServe, who eventually offered Yampolsky the CEO position.

MedServe is modernizing drug security at hospitals and ambulatory facilities with digital medication storage. Instead of analog cabinets, metal keys, and paper records, MedServe provides an organized container for narcotics that keeps track of every drug digitally. It efficiently prevents theft, abuse, and error.

“I fell in love with [pharmacy]. I could see how pharmacists play a role in the entire clinical ecosystem. ”
—Alex Yampolsky

While focusing on leading MedServe, Yampolsky, who now lives in Chicago, recently returned to UW–Madison to talk with PharmD students in the School’s Operations and Technology Management concentration about his unconventional path through pharmacy and entrepreneurship.

“I tell students, do what makes you happy,” he says. “I hate to see people go into fields they don’t care about because they think that’s their only option. The world is huge. There are so many opportunities. You can do anything — you just have to figure out what that anything is.”