"So... Your Patients Aren't Refilling Their Prescriptions?"

Each time I see a new case study about the high clinical and financial costs of refill noncompliance, I wonder what role pharmacy can play to help reverse these statistics.

Pharmacy is being squeezed from every side to lower drug costs. The future could look bleak IF everything hinged on this. It's too easy to get bogged down with all the details of purchasing costs -- and overlook the professional rewards and financial benefits that a well-planned patient education strategy can bring to your pharmacy.

The first step is to ask why the patient didn't refill the prescription?

• Did the person not understand how to take the medication correctly?
• Did the person develop an annoying side effect they didn't know how to manage... and stopped taking the medication?
• Did the person see something about the medication in a newspaper or Internet chat room that frightened them?
• Did the person discuss their concerns with the pharmacist before deciding not to refill the prescription? If not, why? Did they think the pharmacist was too busy?

Without a well-planned patient education strategy, a pharmacy can never increase patient compliance and meet the patient's needs. It is critical to remember that the pharmacy directly bears the consequences of "inappropriate" patient decisions. When patients don't refill their prescriptions, the pharmacy's ROI suffers. Recent studies show that:

• The average pharmacy loses as much as $9,500 in revenues a year just from poor compliance with hypertensive drugs.
• By increasing the number of refills overall by as little as 10%, a community pharmacy's sales could jump by more than $55,000 a year.
• A pharmacy's net profit could rise more than $8,000 for each 10% increase in refills. A 10% increase in refill compliance is a low figure. In fact, a 50% increase in refill compliance is a very achievable goal, and would produce approximately $238,000 in added revenues a year. Imagine the increase in net profit if you increased refill compliance to 70%!