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Data-based pharmacy reports provide an invaluable way for pharmacists to gain insight into key performance areas, including profitability, staffing, inventory, dispensing, and patient outcomes. Reports also help identify trends in patient behavior and detect “red flags” about potential problems and weaknesses.
In a perfect world, pharmacists would diligently review this research and use it to guide decisions. It’s not a perfect world, though, and instead, pharmacy reports often go unread, misunderstood, and underutilized without the effort to act on them. This is a missed opportunity. The PrimeRx system, for example, allows pharmacies to customize reports on just about any metric. Reports are presented in a user-friendly, concise format that accurately reflects pharmacy activity.
Pharmacy reports can be game-changers in improving efficiency, profitability, and patient outcomes. Let’s delve into some of the details and put your pharmacy on track to unlock the potential of its most valuable asset – the data waiting to be tapped and analyzed.
Table of Contents
What are Pharmacy Reports and Why Do They Matter?
A good way to describe an independent pharmacy might be as “a small business with extenuating circumstances.” On the one hand, a pharmacy operates like any other business, with expenses for inventory, rent, utilities, payroll, taxes, insurance, and other fixed costs. But unlike a typical small business, pharmacies face unique circumstances, including voluminous regulatory mandates, complex purchasing agreements, decreasing profitability, and increasing patient care responsibilities. It’s a lot, and it’s easy to see how a pharmacy could get lost in the reams of data that arrive each day. Too much data and not enough information is one way to look at it.
Pharmacy reports, though, change everything. Pharmacy reports are data-driven analyses that allow pharmacy owners to drill down into specific metrics to gain an overview that accurately reflects performance, supporting smarter decisions at every level. The numbers, as they say, don’t lie. And since pharmacy reports are data-based, they are a trusted source of information about the pharmacy’s overall financial health and a good determinant of what’s working, along with areas of concern.
A report published in the Hospital Pharmacy Journal noted that for too long, pharmacies missed out on the strategic insights available through proper data analysis. Pharmacy technicians, for example, took a siloed approach and focused on one-time reports on topics like dispensing volume, without considering impacts across the pharmacy. Did dispensing volume have a correlation with patient outcomes? Medication affordability? Inventory supplies? Answers to these and other pertinent questions are readily available through data-based pharmacy reports.
What Do Pharmacy Reports Reveal About Your Profitability?
Financial performance is top of mind for every pharmacy owner, and data-based reports allow insight into the nitty-gritty of profit-related metrics. A few examples, each of which is offered through PrimeRx, include:
- Drugs dispensed. A listing of all drugs dispensed, including the cost and profit generated by each medication.
- Dispensing volume. Analysis of dispensing volume, which can be used for hourly, weekly, monthly, or annual comparisons.
- Top/Slow Performers. A listing of best-selling and most profitable drugs. This can help with revenue projections and inventory forecasting. The system can also reveal slow-selling drugs and surface recommended reorder points to inform inventory decisions.
- Refills Due. Visibility into outstanding refills and the ability to reach out to affected patients can be an effective way to improve a pharmacy’s dispensing rate. PrimeRx provides this information via a “refills due” report that lists all medications due for refill. The report can be customized based on a wide range of preferences, including date range, facility, prescriber, and profit range.
- Claims Reimbursements. Pharmacy owners can carefully track reimbursement activity for several purposes:
- Ability to quickly identify under-payments.
- An updated record of funds received by the pharmacy.
- An updated listing of rejected or delayed claims.
- Historical comparisons of payer reimbursement rates for each drug.
- Profit/Revenue Report. A detailed overview of all factors affecting pharmacy performance. This includes a summary of each insurer’s activity and depicts the pharmacy’s rate of profit for each area. The report also indicates areas in which the pharmacy is showing a loss.
- DIR Fee Management. Although DIR fees are now collected at the point of sale, they remain a significant pain point for pharmacies and a drain on pharmacy revenue. Pharmacy reports provide overviews of each PBM contract and track performance across metrics that affect DIR assessments.
Are Your Staffing Levels Reflected in Your Performance Data?
Along with inventory and DIR fees, payroll tops the list of pharmacy expenses. Finding ways to ensure staff efficiency and control costs wherever possible can be a significant boost to the bottom line. PrimeRx allows direct visibility into staffing issues with pharmacy reports that include:
- Scheduling Assistance. The system can determine a pharmacy’s peak period, including dispensing volume during that period. Alternatively, data can also identify the pharmacy’s slower times. This insight can help pharmacists ensure proper staffing levels and avoid having extra staff on hand when they are not needed.
- Staff Productivity. A pharmacy report can detail each staff member’s productivity by tracking the number of prescriptions filled versus the number of prescriptions in the dispensing queue. Reports can also identify the time needed to complete certain tasks, track progress toward efficiency benchmarks, and flag areas in which training may be needed.
- Patient safety. Pharmacy reports can also track dispensing errors and identify employees who may pose a risk to patient safety.
What Can Inventory Reports Tell You That You’re Missing?
Inventory is the pharmacy’s costliest and most important asset. But ensuring the “right” medications are in stock when needed can sometimes seem like an expensive game of chance. No pharmacy wants to experience a stockout, but neither does a pharmacy want to have costly medications expire while on the shelf. Pharmacy reports enable data-based insights that can help the pharmacist make informed decisions about inventory purchases.
Inventory-related reports available through PrimeRx include:
- Inventory Status. A comprehensive overview of inventory holdings on a drug-by-drug basis. This includes pricing comparisons and holdings of brand-name drugs as well as generics.
- Inventory consumption. Shows inventory received versus inventory dispensed over a selected time frame.
- Drug Inactivity Report. Documents drugs that have not been dispensed over a selected period.
- Average Consumption Report. Shows daily, weekly, and monthly usage on a drug-by-drug basis.
- Inventory Reconciliation. Serves as a “master” report that details any discrepancies between physical inventories and system accounts. This allows the pharmacy to investigate and locate the source of any discrepancy and make sure all accounts are in sync.
How Do Pharmacy Reports Connect to Patient Outcomes?
While pharmacy reports certainly improve efficiency and cost effectiveness, perhaps the biggest impact is in patient care. As mentioned, pharmacies take in reams of patient data every day, most of which is ignored. This includes comprehensive data on patient information, medications, adherence barriers, patient outcomes, patient safety, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and compliance, to name a few, including actionable pharmacy reports that bring this data together.
PrimeRx unlocks the underlying messages of this data with pharmacy reports that include:
- Adherence: Identification of all patients who are non-adherent to their medications. Pharmacies can then follow up with those individuals to determine the reason for non-adherence and develop a strategy to keep patients on their medicine.
- Refills: Reports that list all outstanding prescription refills. Ensuring patients refill their medications is an important way of maintaining adherence while boosting the pharmacy’s bottom line.
- Targeted Patient Outreach: Reports can be generated that identify groups of patients with shared characteristics who might benefit from pharmacy outreach. This might include, for example, a message to all diabetes patients or reminders about influenza, shingles vaccinations for seniors, or referrals to specialists for high-risk patients.
- Patient Health Records: PrimeRx allows pharmacies to create and maintain comprehensive patient health records and generate detailed pharmacy reports.
Pharmacists have never had access to the volume or scope of data that arrives in the pharmacy each day. Too often, though, important data goes unused, denying the pharmacy valuable insight about opportunities to improve patient care and efficiency. With PrimeRx, accessing the data can be as easy as a few clicks of the mouse. A few clicks that can transform pharmacy operations and keep patients satisfied.