You run a successful long-term care (LTC) pharmacy business. Your facility customers and their residents are happy. Your operations run like a well-oiled machine. You’re well-known and respected in your community

But you’re also ready to take the next step. What does growth look like in the LTC pharmacy business? Below we’ll share helpful tips for scaling.

1. Assess Your Current Operations

If you’re planning to grow your LTC pharmacy business, you should start by assessing your current operations. Evaluate your existing pharmacy workflows and ask the right questions: What’s working? What’s not working? Which inefficient, outdated processes could benefit from an overhaul?

Starting off with a close look at your pharmacy’s operations will help you identify opportunities for improvement as well as any potential limitations. This way, you can address any initial challenges, avoid mistakes, develop a strategic plan based on the current state of your business, and set a scalable foundation for what’s ahead.

2. Implement the Right Technology

Scaling a pharmacy business is no doubt challenging—but the process can be simplified quite a bit with the right technology to support your growth efforts. Investing in a pharmacy management system—as well as any complementary tools—will enable you to automate manual processes to scale more efficiently.

When you’re evaluating pharmacy management systems, it’s important to look for one like FrameworkLTC that's specifically designed for long-term care. LTC pharmacy software is purpose-built with certain nuances in mind. For example, robust billing tools help navigate prescription billing changes that are unique to LTC pharmacies. Many systems also offer the ability to customize based on facility and patient requests.

3. Expand Your Services and Specialties

Another helpful tip for scaling your LTC pharmacy is to consider expanding your service offerings and specialty areas. Diversifying your pharmacy’s services will increase your reach and help you attract more potential customers.

Administering vaccines, screening for certain illnesses, filling specialty medications, and offering compounding services are all ways you can expand. Investing in a specialty area—such as LTC at home, palliative and hospice care, behavioral health facilities, and so on—will help you stand out next to your competitors and grow your business.

4. Strengthen Communication and Collaboration

Expanding your services and specialties isn’t enough in itself—you also need to position your LTC pharmacy as a trusted vendor partner that facilities and patients can turn to. That means finding ways to increase communication and collaboration with facilities, which will help increase both short- and long-term customer retention.

A facility web portal like FrameworkVision will help you improve facility relationships. Additionally, an electronic content management solution like FrameworkECM makes it easy to communicate with prescribers, request changes, and stay connected in near-real-time—all while avoiding the dreaded fax machine.

5. Consider Forming Strategic Partnerships

Forming strategic partnerships with other pharmacies, healthcare organizations, and nonprofits is another great way to expand your LTC pharmacy. For example, partnering with hospitals, health systems, home health agencies, specialty pharmacies, or compounding pharmacies can help you attract more lasting customers.

In addition to partnering, you might also consider acquiring a company to address new markets. Acquiring a smaller pharmacy with a particular focus area is a great approach when you want to expand your offering but your staff lack a certain specialized skill set.

6. Invest in Staff Training and Development

Staff training and development is critical to any business’s growth, and LTC pharmacies are no exception. To ensure staff competency at scale, make it a point to thoroughly train all pharmacists and technicians and invest in their ongoing development.

It’s essential to train staff on both medication management and the use of technology within your pharmacy. Each LTC pharmacy operates a little differently, and ensuring you have a knowledgeable team on deck will help you scale without unnecessary limitations.

7. Ensure Compliance Quality Control

Ensuring compliance is as necessary as it is challenging. Implementing quality control measures will help you ensure compliance and protect patient safety in the process. Keep in mind regulatory requirements will likely become more complex as you scale. Consider investing in a pharmacy management system with compliance support, which will provide quality checks and balances to help you remain consistently compliant.

8. Expand Marketing and Outreach Efforts

Marketing is another important piece of the scaling puzzle. In order to grow, you need to learn the unique needs of your prospective customers. This will typically differ based on the type(s) of facility you support. Once you better understand your target audience, find ways to stand out and gain a competitive edge. Identify and share differentiators to help attract facility customers to your business and keep them coming back.

9. Use Data and Analytics for Optimization

A lot can be gained and gleaned from using pharmacy data to analyze areas of your business. Real-time pharmacy data and analytics provide full visibility into your daily operations, helping pinpoint opportunities to reduce costs and maximize efficiency as you scale. Inventory management, billing, and staffing are all different areas that can be optimized with access to the right insights.

Start Scaling with FrameworkLTC

There you have it—nine helpful tips to guide your pharmacy’s growth journey. That said, this blog post only skims the surface when it comes to the benefits technology offers. To learn more about scaling your LTC pharmacy with FrameworkLTC, schedule a demo. We’d love to show you our solution and discuss how we can help meet your growth goals.