Sep 01, 2017
Four Key Ways a Pharmacy Locator Service Can Increase Your Brand Awareness and “Wow” Your Patients
One of the biggest challenges health care professionals face when it comes to keeping patients healthy is ensuring that the medication they prescribe can be found at the pharmacy. Pharmacies will not stock medications if they believe the product will simply sit on the shelves, which can ultimately leaves patients unable to find the medication prescribed by their physician.
PharmaCentra’s Pharmacy Locator Service, which has just exceeded over two-million pharmacy connections, helps remedy this challenge. In the program, live operators assist patients in finding their prescription at a nearby pharmacy, which saves patients and the healthcare providers considerable time and hassle while increasing brand loyalty and adherence.
What is the Pharmacy Locator Service?
PharmaCentra’s Pharmacy Locator Service is a proprietary service used to ensure patients get their prescribed medications filled in a timely manner at the pharmacy. It does so by streamlining the process healthcare providers use when prescribing medications and provides a white-glove telephonic and online resource to patients and physicians.
The overall goal of Pharmacy Locator is to ensure that every patient can have his or her prescription filled as quickly and painlessly as possible. This goal is achieved by following four key strategies
Core Strategies of PharmaCentra’s Pharmacy Locator Service
Use live pharmacy verification calls to assist patients, physicians, and company field sales representatives in locating the correct product in the correct dosage in a timely manner. Stocking reports are always dated and you do not want to risk an upset patient if the product is not in stock.
Provide company-approved product and stocking information to pharmacy staff during the process of location calls, such as NDC #’s, recommended stock to keep on hand, etc.
Follow up with patients to ensure they were able to get their prescription filled correctly. This closes the loop on the process and ensures a happy patient.
Provide pharmaceutical companies with valuable business intelligence reports including program results and analytics
So how do these objectives set your company, and its products, up for success? Here are four key ways:
Physicians Prescribe your Product with Greater Confidence
One of the biggest challenges physicians face is minimizing prescription abandonment, which is closely related to prescription availability. In many ways, stocking a product is a balancing act for pharmacies: carry too much of a product and it may collect dust on the pharmacy shelf; carry too little and you risk patients abandoning their prescriptions after too many hours spent wasted trying to find it.
As if it wasn’t already complicated enough, certain products can be difficult to accurately stock for, especially new product launches and C-II schedule drugs. With most new launch products, it takes many pharmacy calls to find a pharmacy that can fill the prescription in an acceptable timeframe for the patient; for C-II medications, the pharmacy decline rate is even higher. Thus, locating a prescription can often prove a major pain point for the patient.
The Pharmacy Locator Service helps make these problems a thing of the past. Using real-time pharmacy stocking verification, healthcare professionals can prescribe their patients exactly what they need and rest easy knowing that it will be stocked and ready when the patient comes to pick it up.
Increase the Patient’s Overall Satisfaction
There’s nothing more frustrating than driving to the other side of town to fill a prescription, only to find out that the pharmacy is out of stock. The average person prescribed to a medication will only try a couple of pharmacies before giving up their search, so failure to keep your product stocked can and will result in lost sales and unhappy patients.
Pharmacy Locator eliminates this problem: patients are able to verify that their medication will be available by calling a Pharmacy Locator Specialist. Easy availability leads to satisfied, brand-loyal patients and confident health care providers happy to prescribe your product.
Drive Brand Awareness and Market Share
The Pharmacy Locator Service creates urgency to stock at the pharmacy level, both improving the presence and availability of your product and addressing compliance at the point of purchase. Each time a call is placed to the pharmacy looking for the medication, it creates demand and encourages the pharmacy to place an order. Stocked shelves and happy patients leads to reduced brand-switching, heightened brand awareness, patient compliance and market share.
Improve your Go-to-market Strategy with Detailed Analytics
The Pharmacy Locator Service also provides pharmaceutical companies detailed analytics to monitor their market performance and adjust their strategies accordingly. The analytics gives the pharmaceutical company visibility into stocking behaviors, detailed pharmacy responses and patient comments that they would not otherwise see.
Sales reps, brand and regional managers gain access to actionable intelligence that allows them to follow up with pharmacies, identify challenges and develop strategies to improve availability.
Conclusion
Orchestrating a new product launch requires years of preparation. PharmaCentra’s Pharmacy Locator Service as a launch strategy ensures the years of hard work reach full potential, by confirming that every prescription written results in a fill at the pharmacy.
From heightened confidence from healthcare providers to an easier prescription fill for patients, our Pharmacy Locator Program can make selling your product a much simpler affair. Interested in more on how you can achieve this with one of your upcoming products?
