6 Mistakes to Avoid When Scaling Your LTC Pharmacy

Ensuring long-term sustainability as a long-term care (LTC) pharmacy is challenging enough—and scaling your business is a completely different story.

From reimbursement obstacles and high dispensing costs to increasing competition and regulatory requirements, LTC pharmacies face a whole myriad of issues that can impede their growth. But in order to avoid making mistakes, you first have to know what to watch out for.

Scaling Your LTC Pharmacy: 6 Critical Mistakes to Avoid

Be aware of these six critical mistakes that may be keeping you from scaling your LTC pharmacy. We also have essential solutions to help you avoid said pitfalls.

1. Lack of Automation for Manual Workflows

Automation is the future for many industries, streamlining workflows and creating efficiencies to save time and improve operations—and pharmacy is certainly no exception. More and more LTC pharmacies are turning to technology to automate manual, time-intensive workflows that are both inefficient and prone to error.

Not taking advantage of automation technology to streamline workflows can prevent your pharmacy from working at maximum efficiency and gaining a competitive edge that helps you stand out from your counterparts. Automation also improves order accuracy, reducing dangerous dispensing errors that put patient safety at risk.

Additionally, automation technology frees LTC pharmacy staff up to focus on what matters most: ensuring the right prescription makes it to the right patient, in the right dosage and at the right time.

2. Lack of Preparation for Regulatory or Insurance Audits

Compliance with regulations and insurance requirements is a must in LTC pharmacy. Being ill-prepared for regulatory or insurance audits can lead to hefty fines and other regulatory challenges that can be detrimental for a business that’s trying to grow.

Ask yourself these questions: How quickly can your pharmacy provide the reports and documentation needed? Will those demands derail your day-to-day operations? Is your LTC pharmacy equipped to deal with ever-evolving regulatory changes, or not so much? Answering these questions will help you evaluate whether your pharmacy is prepared to be compliant in a dynamic regulatory environment.

And if not? The right pharmacy management software can help there, too.

3. Poor Communication with Facility Partners

Customer retention is essential for LTC pharmacies looking to scale. LTC pharmacies need to build and maintain strong relationships with facility partners to ensure both short-term and long-term customer retention. Strong communication and collaborative partnerships are key when it comes to building those pharmacy-facility relationships.

To do so, LTC pharmacies need the ability to keep an open line of communication with facility customers and prescribers at all times. Having uninterrupted ways to receive orders on a 24/7 basis is imperative—which is where EMAR and EHR integrations come in to play. EMAR/EHR integrations—in addition to solutions like FrameworkVision—enable seamless collaboration between LTC pharmacies and facilities, enhancing communication with real-time insights to keep everyone in the loop.

4. Limited Visibility into Pharmacy Operations

Most businesses today use data to inform their decisions and help boost their growth over time. Effectively scaling your LTC pharmacy requires full visibility into production, billing, and inventory. In fact, 72 percent of long-term care pharmacies indicated an average increase in expenses of around 6 percent since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

You can imagine how without data, your pharmacy loses insight in to each of these areas to help control costs and manage operational performance. By contrast, using real-time data and setting up dashboards (either internally at your LTC pharmacy or for facilities) enables robust reporting and awareness of where every prescription within your pharmacy is at any given time. Plus, you can better manage inventory, billing, staffing, and more—all with the help of LTC pharmacy data and analytics to support your efforts.

5. Lack of Marketing for Your Pharmacy

Scaling your LTC pharmacy requires marketing in order to attract new clients. Relying on growth through acquisition and/or taking over contracts from other LTC pharmacies rather than proactively marketing your own business is a misstep. Why? Even though acquisition is still a great way to grow, it can’t be the only strategy for scaling over time.

Marketing your pharmacy services starts with understanding the needs of your facility customers and then identifying ways to stand out in the crowd. Pinpoint your differentiators and share them with prospective clients to win and keep their business. For example, if you offer multi-dose compliance packaging, facility-centric customization, or flexible delivery schedules, find ways to let potential customers know that and set yourself apart from the rest.

6. Poor Customer Service and Low Satisfaction

LTC pharmacies are businesses just like any other. Much like communication and collaboration are critical for scaling your LTC pharmacy, great customer service is key to preventing facility churn and attracting new customers.

What makes for great customer service in the LTC pharmacy space? It’s about not only making yourself and your staff readily available but also developing a comprehensive understanding of each facility partner’s unique, nuanced needs. Using rules-based technology is the best way to accommodate those needs. With technology on your side, you can manage preferences across multi-wing facilities, facility-specific workflow needs, and more—all allowing you to provide superior service for your customers.

Using LTC Pharmacy Software to Improve Your Scalability

Pharmacy management software designed to accommodate the nuances of LTC pharmacies, such as FrameworkLTC, can help address the above mishaps and enable continuous, sustainable business growth. Purpose-built pharmacy software can ultimately help with scaling your LTC pharmacy by:

• Putting checks and balances in place for regulatory/compliance audits

• Enabling seamless collaboration between LTC pharmacies and facilities

• Providing visibility into all LTC pharmacy operations with robust reporting

• Offering a competitive advantage to help with marketing your LTC pharmacy

• Improving customer retention with better services and support for facilities

• Automating manual workflows to improve pharmacy accuracy and efficiency

Don’t let any avoidable mistakes keep you from scaling your LTC pharmacy—with the right strategies and technologies, you can effectively scale your business over time. Schedule a demo of FrameworkLTC to see firsthand how pharmacy management software can help you improve your business’s scalability.