The pharmacy industry stands at a critical crossroads, as it navigates the interconnected challenges of patient satisfaction, cost pressures and evolving safety protocols. These issues are not only critical to the survival of pharmacies, but they are intertwined together where improving one could risk compromising another. The current landscape is further complicated by rising medication costs, tightening profit margins, increasing demand for medications, staffing challenges and constantly evolving safety regulations.
Pharmacies today must find a way to overcome these challenges, while ensuring that patients continue to receive their medications on time, in the correct dosage, and at a cost that allows the pharmacy to continue to realize a profit even as margins are shrinking. According to McKinsey, “The US retail pharmacy landscape faces saturated retail locations, ongoing labor shortages, inflationary pressure, and a leveling-off of generic drug penetration.” Pharmacies must understand the factors that impact patient satisfaction and ever-evolving consumer preferences.
Meeting prescription promise times is increasingly tied to patient satisfaction. Pharmacies who fail to meet promise times and the patients’ expectations of time for pharmacist counseling risk losing patients in a competitive field that includes mail order pharmacies. Studies show that patient satisfaction is growing with online pharmacies while it continues to decrease in the retail setting.
Increasing staffing or providing more customer hours to meet demand and increase patient satisfaction comes at a financial cost, hindered greatly by lack of available staff, the rising cost of pharmaceuticals, and decreasing profit margins.
In addition to patient satisfaction and financial concerns, patient safety is a top concern for pharmacists and patients alike. The most common safety issues include dispensing an incorrect medication, miscalculating a dosage, failing to identify drug interactions or dispensing an incorrect dosage strength.
The pressure put on staff to deliver patient satisfaction by filling prescriptions when promised can cause staff who are rushed and overworked to lower their vigilance and time spent on thorough safety checks designed to reduce errors. According to Pharmacy Times, medication errors are among the most common health care errors, affecting at least 1.5 million people every year and consuming critical resources. Prioritizing safety is critical to ongoing operations and patient safety.
Patient satisfaction is the lifeblood of any pharmacy in today’s competitive market, yet ongoing pressure to the bottom line due to shrinking profit margins can make it challenging to develop solutions to address these critical priorities. The interdependent nature of these challenges is a challenge unto itself, causing pharmacists to be faced with managing a very delicate balance.
In our white paper The Current Dilemma in Pharmacy: Balancing Patient Satisfaction, Cost Reduction and Safety Protocols, we delve further into the issue facing pharmacy today and suggest strategies for achieving balance.