Vaccines are a low-hanging fruit for pharmacy. Immunizations provide decent reimbursement and can attract new customers into your establishment. With chain pharmacies joining the party, it is becoming more important to carefully manage and curate your immunization program to best serve both your patients and your store’s health.
Vaccines are generally more labor intensive as compared to traditional pharmacy prescriptions. They require special storage, a qualified pharmacist, technician, or nurse to administer them, different billing aspects and other clinical and legal requirement. This accounts for the administration fee being paid to the pharmacy being orders of magnitude larger than a prescription dispensing fee.
But today, managing a vaccination program is more challenging. Let’s look at some of the pain points in running such a program.
- Inventory: vaccines are generally not inexpensive. Like any product, we have to ensure we have product to administer but also have adequate turns of the inventory.
- Packaging: you often cannot purchase one dose of vaccine. You must purchase, in most cases, a minimum of 10 doses. If purchasing directly from a manufacturer, the minimums go up from there. This makes the cost of entry into this program higher up front.
- Cash Flow: Insurance payment for these more expensive items often take longer to be processed, especially those submitted to the Medical benefit. It is likely you will have to pay for the vaccine well before you receive the reimbursement.
- Workflow: a successful vaccination program will be able to efficiently process and administer a lot of vaccines / patients in a short period of time. This requires space or creativity / planning. Space is at a premium in most stores, essentially mandating creativity and planning strategies.
There are a lot of ways to optimize your Vaccination program. The easiest and most efficient way is to actively use a scheduling system. Covid vaccinations at most pharmacies were almost exclusively by appointment, and today it generally acceptable if not expected by patients that all vaccinations are done by appointment. This affords you several opportunities to minimize some of the above challenges.
First, scheduling allows you to order the vaccine to arrive immediately prior to the scheduled clinic time. This affords the minimum time between your purchasing terms and the delay in reimbursement.
Scheduling also allows you to open appointments for just the number of packages of vaccine you have. If you open 10 slots for Shingrix Vaccine on a day or week, and schedule 10 patients you maximize the chance that you won’t have excess vaccine sitting in inventory.
Scheduling also allows you a chance to look at the patient’s vaccine history prior to their appointment. By spotting other vaccination opportunities for that patient, you can contact the patient and arrange additional vaccines at the same appointment to maximize your effort and return on investment.
Finally, knowing what you will be doing on a given day allows you better schedule resources and staff to make everything run smoothly.
Scheduling vaccines is one great tool to help you better manage your resources and your profitability. For other ideas, or for additional help, our consultants can help! Visit Innovative Pharmacy Solutions.
