Modern retail pharmacies are facing significant hurdles, from staffing shortages and burnout, to declining store sales, online competition, and increased margin pressures. These mounting business challenges have resulted in store closures.
But, even as the news sounds challenging, many industry experts see a reason to be optimistic in the strong support and opportunities for growth pharmacists continue to find among their patient communities.
In a recent podcast, Walgreens Chief Pharmacy Officer and Chairman of the National Association of Chain Drug Stores (NACDS) Rick Gates noted that, for the first time in 10 years, the annual Gallup poll of trustworthiness among professions found Americans ranked pharmacists higher than primary care physicians for honesty and ethical standards. The Wolters Kluwer Pharmacy Next survey revealed that up to 81% of U.S. consumers would trust a pharmacist to diagnose minor illnesses and treat them.
The path to success lies in community care services
Pharmacies can turn current industry obstacles into strategic advantages by expanding beyond the traditional transactional operational model built around dispensing to focus on adopting innovative practices that will lead their evolution into trusted – and profitable – community health hubs.
Not only does community health represent potential new revenue streams for pharmacy’s future, but it may also be a necessity for pursuing greater health equity. In the U.S., 20% of the population lives in rural communities, but only 11% of physicians practice in these areas. That means that the patient-to-primary care physician ratio in rural areas is only 39.8 physicians per 100,000 people, compared with 53.3 physicians per 100,000 in urban areas.
By contrast, 95% of Americans live within 5 miles of a pharmacy and 90% live within 2 miles of one, making pharmacy community hubs the ideal locations to advance nonemergent care for patients with barriers to access.
In his podcast, NACDS chair Gates said that future-focused pharmacies should look toward modernizing their operational model with certain “next generation” investments in mind, including:
- Increasing efficiency to help free up staff to deliver more direct care like medication therapy management and immunizations.
- Scalable clinical programs to support chronic care management while driving sustainable growth.
- Elevating the pharmacist’s role to help them feel more satisfied in a rewarding, long-term career.
While these may sound like daunting changes, there are incremental steps your pharmacy can take to start implementing expanded clinical services and programming that meets patients where they are, leaning into a community care hub model.
Embracing innovative pharmacy practices to help meet customer expectations
There has been an undeniable shift in customer expectations related to the speed, convenience, and personalization of healthcare delivery driven by the overall increase in on-demand and customized services in almost every other industry.
Experts note that there are several ways retail pharmacies can adapt to these trends in patient demand, drawing more consumers with new or expanded service lines that also have potential to drive new streams of revenue:
- Leverage data to identify gaps in care and trigger personalized outreach, for example, proactively reminding patients of upcoming immunizations or routine preventive care tests or services.
- Offer omnichannel choices to meet patients where they are, such as digital appointment check-ins or virtual care options.
- Provide integrated digital health content that allows pharmacists to deploy – through a variety of delivery methods, including texts, emails, website links, and QR codes – patient-facing educational materials and videos to personalize wellness, encourage treatment adherence, and build relationships by continuing the conversations begun in the pharmacy.
The impact of digital patient education on pharmacy business
Perhaps one of the most direct ways to start exploring a community care hub model is to expand consumer engagement and education initiatives.
Engaging with individual patients is vital to supporting adherence and safety as well driving consumer loyalty. However, busy pharmacists often don’t have the time or bandwidth to provide those services in the ways they might wish or at the level they were trained.
The key to effective patient engagement is providing the right information to the right patient at the right time in the right format. Digital tools that educate and engage patients and support medication adherence can not only help pharmacists and improve outcomes, they can also be a competitive advantage and business game-changer:
- Digital education offers an opportunity to teach patients holistically, aligning medication safety and usage instruction with related condition management information. This is often difficult for busy pharmacists to accomplish in a five-minute consultation, so digital engagement helps free up staff time while advancing patient outcomes and loyalty.
- An educated patient or consumer who better understands their condition is potentially more open to next steps in their care journey, including condition management or healthy lifestyle tips (also delivered digitally) or applicable testing (done in pharmacy), which represent further revenue.
Utilizing essential tools like UpToDate® Consumer Education and UpToDate® Digital Medication Education can help pharmacies build a resilient and forward-thinking business model that employs new technologies without reinventing the entire foundation of an existing system.
With digital engagement solutions, pharmacies can meet their patients where they are in the format they prefer. These tools can:
- Provide digital links to medication information that is updated as new evidence emerges.
- Engage patients at home with automated medication reminders.
- Help patients access medication information in their preferred manner.
- Embed within current pharmacy workflows for easy, turnkey access for staff.
When accessible, inclusive health education is available to consumers in flexible, convenient, and environmentally friendly formats, it also helps create efficiency for the pharmacy and pharmacists. By connecting patients to vital medication education via QR codes on prescription labels, organizations can reduce paper costs and save time filling prescriptions, helping to free up staff and budget to focus on expanded community care initiatives and clinical service lines.
eBook: Discover how your pharmacy can adapt to modern industry challenges
The importance of pharmacies to local communities cannot be denied – as a convenient and trusted care setting, and for some patients, the only accessible one. That’s why it’s essential that valuable pharmacy locations weather the challenges facing the industry and re-envision themselves with a focus on community health to drive loyalty and revenue. But all of this requires planning and upfront investment in strategic tools to help promote administrative and workflow efficiency and support staff decision-making to save time and reduce burnout.
Learn more in our eBook, “Transforming crisis into progress: Building tomorrow’s community health hub today.”
