5 Bad Habits to Break Now for a Healthier Pharmacy Business

It takes a lot of repetition to create a habit. Anyone who’s ever decided to make a significant change in lifestyle or in their business can attest to this fact. Trying to make a habit of choosing salad over fries or getting to work 10 minutes early isn’t easy. You have to work at it. But right along with creating those desirable habits, comes breaking the not so good ones.  Like hitting the snooze button and going out to eat all the time.  

We can all list any number of bad habits in our personal lives. And those habits probably even leak into our professional lives.  But what about not so great habits that exist strictly in the business environment? Yes, they exist. And in your pharmacy, they make a difference in the way your pharmacy operates. Probably not a positive difference either.  

Here are 5 habits to break in your pharmacy. Along with an alternative habit to create a healthier pharmacy business.  

Stop individually pricing items. It’s time consuming, increases pricing errors, and leads to a loss of profitability. Instead, get in the habit of regularly updating prices in your pharmacy POS system and printing shelf labels. It’s quick and easy to go put a new label on the shelf. Make it a regular, scheduled occurrence based around when you get price updates from your wholesaler. Check out this article on pharmacy pricing strategy for more tips.  

Stop manually managing your customer loyalty program. The days where a punch card could be a part of a successful customer loyalty program are long gone. Sure, it might give your customer incentive to spend more money, but more likely it’s going to be lost and forgotten about the moment they leave the store. Plus, you’ll have no data on your most loyal customers or customer attrition. And you won’t have any idea of how successful your program actually is. A fully integrated customer loyalty program still takes work and management, but the time you spend will yield much better results. 

Stop capturing signatures outside of the point-of-sale. A pharmacy is unique as it’s important that you capture all of the necessary signatures for any given transaction. If you split that between your pharmacy system and your point-of-sale system, you’re making more work for your staff and your customers. Pharmacy system integrations allow you to capture all the signatures you need for a given transaction at the point-of-sale. HIPAA, Safety Cap declines, prescription acknowledgements, controlled substance sales, and all of your payment related signatures should all go through the same system as part of the same workflow. Some signatures can even be combined to save time and make things even easier for your customers.  

Stop ignoring your will-call.  Having the ability to see additional prescriptions available for pickup in your pharmacy system is a valuable tool. But if you ignore your will-call, it becomes inaccurate (due to scripts not being properly scanned at the register, etc.).  What occurs then is that on-screen reminder that a customer has other available prescriptions just becomes ignored. Making a new habit out of active will call reconciliation gets rid of this problem. You just scan all of the available prescriptions in will-call on a regular basis and purge any that are marked as available but not present. No wasted time for clerks and your customers get all the prescriptions they have available.  

Stop manually tracking PSE Sales. Many states now require that you report sales of Pseudoephedrine to a national program in addition to regular tracking requirements and sales restrictions. If you’re in the habit of manually managing any part of this process, it’s a big drain on time, and errors are probably fairly common. Setting up your POS system to require ID, limit sales, and report to NPLEx (if you need it) means you don’t even have to replace a bad habit with a new one. Just let your pharmacy POS technology take over.  

The trend here is that pharmacy point-of-sale makes it easier to create habits and processes that help your pharmacy grow, rather than holding it back. What everyday tasks do you perform in your pharmacy that you’d like to change? Comment below.