“My pharmacy is very small, and we don’t have a lot of OTC’s.”

“We don’t do a lot of retail business.”

“Our pharmacy has no front end.”

Do any of these statements ring true for your pharmacy? It’s certainly not uncommon for local apothecary pharmacies and outpatient or clinic pharmacies to have a very small, or perhaps nonexistent, selection of OTC products.  And we talk to a lot of pharmacies who operate stores focused less on retail and more on prescriptions, health & wellness, and patient care. In fact, a lot of pharmacies just like these are RMS customers. 

Yup, you read that right.  Many pharmacies find the value in point-of-sale regardless of whether retail is a mainstay of their business or just a footnote. Of course it makes sense to have point-of-sale when you have products to receive, prices to update, inventory to manage, and daily orders to process. But is it really a necessity if your primary concerns lie outside of retail and OTC products? 

What could be more convenient than picking up prescriptions, OTC medications and other pharmacy necessities in the same building that you work in? It seems like a given that employees would default to their own pharmacy for any of these purchases.

But as much sense as it might make for employees to swing in for that box of band aids and the bottle of antibiotic ointment over lunch or after a shift, pharmacies large and small still face competition from grocery stores and chain drug stores that carry everything an employee might need and more.

At the end of the day, your pharmacy and health system employees are like any other customer. They'll respond to pricing, convenience, and service. The one difference is that their expectations are likely to be higher. Employees will expect more out of the experience than your average customer.

Over the last several years, we've seen an increased drive to create a solid customer base out of pharmacy and health system employees. Along with creating special employee pricing and other incentives, payroll deduction has played a major part in this initiative.

While it might seem like a relatively small piece of the puzzle next to something like employee discounts, pharmacy point of sale systems with an integrated payroll deduction solution can play a big role in how many health system employees make use of a pharmacy's services.

Is a Meds-to-Beds bedside discharge program on your to-do list for 2019? For many organizations, implementing Meds-to-Beds will be high on the priority list this year as they strive to reduce re-admittance rates, increase patient compliance and satisfaction, and even boost outpatient pharmacy sales.

For many years, our EvolutionPOS and our EvolutionPOSV2 tablet have set the stage for Meds-to-Beds programs in organizations across the country. We've been happy to be able to help with so many different Meds-to-Beds Implementations.

But we've also learned that every implementation comes with its own unique set of challenges. Every organization operates just a little differently and for some, there are barriers to Meds-to-Beds implementation that might be a little bit difficult to surpass.

This time of year, it feels like we need reminders for everything. I've got to-do lists covering the entire surface of my refrigerator, holiday events at my kids school to attend, "Friends-givings" to go to, Thanksgiving dinner to plan and cook, and holiday shopping to finish. When I look at my calendar, I can't help but wonder what crazy person took it over and why they thought it would be funny to fill every available day with something to do. And then I remember that crazy person looks a lot like me!

When RMS was founded 20 years ago, one of the first innovations we brought to market was our pharmacy system interface platform. It became the standard for allowing communication between point of sale systems and different pharmacy systems.

Like most things in the pharmacy vertical, interfaces have evolved quite a bit over the last 20 years. And with that evolution comes more options and features for your pharmacy to take advantage of. No doubt this competitive, feature rich landscape is a major boon for pharmacies of all sizes. That doesn't mean that it's not overwhelming if you're looking at choosing the right pharmacy point-of-sale and pharmacy system vendors to partner with. With so many features and options, where do you start in figuring out what you need? Here's a quick look at some of the basics to help you get started

The commonly accepted meaning of convenience is constantly changing for your customers. They have more options to choose from than ever before. Not just in where they do business, but how they do business. And in a culture where a taps on a smart phone can result in pretty much anything you want being delivered to a doorstep, it's no wonder that many customers will choose to do business with their local pharmacy at the drive-thru.

At RMS, we know that one size doesn't fit all. Even in the world of outpatient pharmacy, where regulatory and compliance requirements rule so much of the day to day activities, there are still different needs and various ways of tackling problems on patient care. 

Of course, that makes the already involved process of evaluating point-of-sale systems even more complex. There are lots of different solutions to help outpatient pharmacies, but no magic button to press that will tell you just what you need. 

While that's not much help, we do find a common thread in the questions we receive from outpatient pharmacy teams on a regular basis. Here are 5 of the most common questions we get asked, along with the reader's digest answer.