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Sarah Hanssen is vice president of sales and marketing at UltiMed, a global developer, manufacturer and distributor of injection devices for consumer diabetes, animal health, and medical surgical markets.
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Enhancing Pharmacy Efficiency: Leveraging Value-Added Products to Benefit Patients and Ease Workload
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Key Takeaways
- Pharmacies now offer value-added services, improving patient outcomes and increasing store visits, but causing pharmacist burnout and understaffing.
- Ready-made products, like pen needles with sharps containers, enhance safety and reduce pharmacy team workload.
Measures like hassle-free safe sharps disposal packaging save critical staff time and resources.
America’s pharmacies have increasingly become community hubs for medical services and information. In fact, the majority of patients visit their local pharmacy nearly twice as often as their physician.1
No longer just quick stops to fill a prescription, most pharmacies now also provide a variety of value-added services such as immunizations, medication therapy management, health screenings, and more. These value-added services or resources offered in addition to standard products or services improve the overall health care experience and health outcomes of patients. When immunizations are offered at pharmacies, for example, vaccine uptake increases.2
However, although advantageous value-added services are good for patients, they can also come at a price: Pharmacist and personnel burnout along with understaffed pharmacies have, unfortunately, become common throughout the industry.
But value-added services can also be good for the bottom line as well. Value-adds bring people into the store, leading to measurable increases in overall sales.3 So how can pharmacies continue to increase their value-added offerings with minimal or even zero impact on the workloads of their pharmacy teams? The answer may be in ready-made value-added products.
Quick Wins in Full Lifecycle Products
Pharmacist scans barcode for the health care products at the checkout. Image Credit: © Gorodenkoff - stock.adobe.com
A stellar example of value-added products that save time for the pharmacy team, but also make the lives of patients easier, are pen needles packaged all-in-one with a sharps container. This offers a complete, compliant and simple way to dispose of sharps, making homes safer while properly disposing of medical waste.
Pharmacists and pharmacy personnel have become the central point of education and contact for sharps disposal. Physicians typically cover the essentials of a patient’s medical condition rather than the medication usage specifics and downstream effects of medical waste management. The pharmacy team is on the front lines where sharps are provided to patients and similarly acts as the central point of education.
Only a small percentage of patients purchase their own sharps containers, so there are a wide variety of behaviors when it comes to disposing of used needles. This includes flushing them down the toilet, storing them in the back of a closet, tossing them freely in the trash, and even returning them in plastic bags to the pharmacy.
Not only are these disposal methods non-compliant with medical waste disposal regulations, they’re also exceptionally unsafe and can lead to needle sticks of anyone inadvertently handling sharps. Sticks from improperly discarded, contaminated needles can cause HIV, hepatitis, and other blood-borne diseases.
It’s dangerous for patients to return used sharps to pharmacies, particularly in plastic bags or other unapproved containers. But it also takes a great deal of the pharmacist’s and pharmacy staff’s time and attention to attempt to safely remedy the situation and educate the patient on proper disposal.
Simply being able to provide pen needles directly packaged with an FDA-cleared sharps container not only provides protection and saves time and effort for the pharmacy team, but it is also an efficient and appreciated value-add for patients.
Pre-Measured Medications
Products with pre-measured dosing and multi-dose packaging can be an enormous benefit for patients needing multiple medications with different instructions as well as those who may have difficulty sorting their dosages and medication schedules.
This type of packaging makes medications easier to manage, removing a large part of the need for complex calculations or manual measurements from the pharmacist and pharmacy team. This efficiency not only enhances workflow but also allows pharmacists to allocate more time to patient care and counseling, ultimately improving overall safety and satisfaction.
Self-Service Options
For pharmacies facing increased patient demand and staffing constraints, investing in an automated prescription pick-up locker system can be an astronomical value-add, allowing patients who do not require pharmacist or staff counseling to securely retrieve their prescription regardless of pharmacy hours.
Simple self-service options such as secure pick-up lockers increase patient satisfaction while bypassing the need to unnecessarily occupy pharmacy staff, allowing them to focus on immediate patient and medication needs.
The Payoff
Carrying value-added products is often more profitable, and added conveniences keep customers coming back. Reimbursement through insurance payouts for these products is typically good as well. So, while they may cost a bit more up front, the value-added products pay off dividends in the end with an equal or greater return on the pharmacy’s investment. Plus, many of these products take up the same amount of shelf space, or even less, so they don’t change the pharmacy planogram either.
Pharmacy customers strongly value convenience and high-quality service. Creating those experiences without undue burden on staff will require a reliance on desirable, quality, value-add products. It is ultimately beneficial to embrace smart upgrades for the benefit of the pharmacy team and patients alike.
REFERENCES
Valliant SN, Burbage SC, Pathak S, Urick BY. Pharmacists as accessible health care providers: quantifying the opportunity. J Manag Care Spec Pharm. 2022 Jan;28(1):85-90. doi:10.18553/jmcp.2022.28.1.85
Le LM, Veettil SK, Donaldson D, Kategeaw W, Hutubessy R, Lambach P, Chaiyakunapruk N. The impact of pharmacist involvement on immunization uptake and other outcomes: An updated systematic review and meta-analysis. J Am Pharm Assoc (2003). 2022 Sep-Oct;62(5):1499-1513.e16. doi:10.1016/j.japh.2022.06.008
Immunizations. National Community Pharmacists Association. 2024. Accessed October 10, 2024. https://ncpa.org/immunizations#:~:text=Vaccinations%20also%20attract%20people%20to,number%20of%20flu%20shots%20administered.
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