A good home delivery offering can complement the in-house pharmacy of any practice. Different teams have different needs, and there are many ways to put home delivery to work for you.
Focus on making home delivery additive to your practice. Your greatest opportunity for patient compliance is at the time of a patient visit and your staff should make every effort to convert product sales in the clinic. But when a client says “not today,” “I may have some at home” or provides any other reason for not buying during their visit, then forward the prescription to your home delivery partner and let them handle the follow-up.
Embrace home delivery as a way to communicate with clients. Every home delivery is an opportunity to touch your client when they are not in the clinic. Client requests and fulfillments can be driven through your practice’s website, every delivery is a reminder of your medical recommendations, and certain providers allow you to personalize a message on the pet owner’s receipt. Each time a product is delivered to your client’s door they are reminded of your clinic’s great service.
Get the entire staff on board. The most effective users of home delivery have the support of the entire practice team. When first starting out, take the time to introduce your staff to the many ways that home delivery enables you to practice better medicine and provide better service. Find ways to motivate your team to adopt home delivery, either through contests for capturing walkouts, establishing team targets or goals, or by fulfilling prescriptions for their own pets through home delivery.
Start with easy wins. When adopting home delivery, it’s often easiest to start with a few select products or categories. Chronic medications and therapeutic diets are great opportunities to establish success. Look for situations where a client maintained your recommendations for a short period and then stopped. Refer that prescription to your home delivery partner and let them help you in fulfillment.
Make home delivery part of the client experience. Make home delivery part of your conversation in the exam room, at discharge, and on the phone. Let clients know your clinic has their own home delivery service and that every product dispensed from your home delivery pharmacy carries the original manufacturer’s guarantee. Most clients using direct-to-consumer pharmacies do so out of convenience and don’t even know you have a home delivery offering.
Discuss implementation of home delivery with your peers. There are clinics all around the country that have embraced home delivery and can help you understand the process and benefits of the home delivery approach.
Capturing Missed Opportunities
Do you know your internal patient compliance for preventive medications? Home delivery can be a great tool to re-capture revenue from your preventive medicine recommendations for clients that don’t purchase these products from you. Is there a compliance gap in your practice?
There are several ways to quantify this opportunity. Many client communication services in the industry provide internal patient compliance metrics as part of their regular offerings. In addition, many practice management systems will allow you to run a search or report that lists patients that have been seen as part of an annual evaluation within the past 12 months but have not purchased preventive products from you. Your practice management system support team can help you set up this report.
Now it’s even easier to implement home delivery seamlessly into your practice with ImproMed’s integration with VetCentric. With ImproMed, each time a client fills or refills a home delivery prescription, your patient’s medical record is automatically and electronically updated, creating a more complete medical history.
Questions about home delivery or VetCentric’s integration with ImproMed? Contact Rob Fitch, VetCentric’s Practice Management Software and Training Specialist, at 410-412-1457 or rfitch@vetcentric.com.
