Non Traditional Services Used to Improve Pharmacy Margins
Non traditional services can help you improve your independent pharmacy’s margins. In this video, Scotty Sykes talks about which services make a difference for pharmacies. He discusses medication adherence for patients, compounding, travel vaccinations, specialty over-the-counter medications and more. He also provides some insight how these non traditional services can impact a pharmacy, especially if you are meeting a unique need for these services in your market. This was the case for one independent pharmacy in a college town which offered specific travel vaccinations. You too can determine these unique services and pharmacy trendsthat you can offer your patients and customers that leads to improved margins and growth.
Find out what service trends are changing the pharmacy industry!
If you prefer to read this content, the video transcript is below.
Yes, the specialty services we’re seeing introduced today, obviously, med sync, adherence, getting more patients signed up, filling more prescriptions, hopefully you have some high profit. Patients involved in that as well, so you’re adding more revenue dollars, margin dollars there. Not to mention the ultimate care of the patient hopefully is improving as well as a result. In addition too, you’re gonna see your efficiencies improve when you’ve got patients on a schedule, you know, you’re able to better manage your inventory, you’re not having that extra inventory sitting on the shelf ’cause you know when to order and how much to order because you’ve got most of your patients on adherence. So we’ve seen a big return as far as that’s concerned as well. Obviously, compounding is huge, you know, the margins there are huge. Sterile, non-sterile, depending on what you’re doing, but compounding revenues and margins are just very profitable. Payroll’s gonna be a little higher as a result, but the bottom line, that income is gonna be substantial as compared to standalone retail. So compounding is a very profitable niche if you know what you’re doing there.
Clearly, we’re seeing some specialty OTC, maybe CBD products. We’re seeing some pharmacists getting into that, but the specialty OTC items can really add some margin dollars as well with margins at 50% plus on those items. And if you’ve got a specialty market there, you can see some monies come in there on the revenue side. Immunization’s clearly one as well, certain travel vaccinations. I’ve seen one where a pharmacist was in a college town, I think there was two colleges in his town, and he was the only one offering these immunizations for college kids going on mission trips and going to study abroad, so he was just making a killing doing immunizations.
So, again, being the entrepreneur business owner, finding a niche that works for you, to add in some extra margin dollars on top of what you’re filling behind the bench, is gonna hopefully push you, push your pharmacy to be slightly above average with margins in the 23 to 24% range. And if you can get your margins up to 25, 26%, one or two percentage of total revenue’s gonna be a lot of money, because we’re talking pharmacies in the three, four, five, six million plus range of revenues annually. So, these little things add up over the year and add to your bottom line, no doubt about it.
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