Provided by The Pharmacy Chick
Lets say for a minute that you are a manufacturer. You want to get your product into the stores but your reps have little success in having pharmacies pre-order it. What to do? Make a loyalty card and MAKE them order it at the request of their patient….
Yup, folks, we all have a hate-hate relationship with the loyalty card. Personally, I’d rather go back to the sample days. Let the doctors manage cabinets full of tiny boxes of pills, creams, ointments and etc. However, like the $4 debacle, this door has been opened and there is no going back. I think its one of the most successful ” grab the pharmacy by its short hairs” invention in all of pharmacy history.
One of my commentors on my post about “reverse distribution” lamented the Nucynta that was left to outdate after he had to order it in for a coupon offer. Sadly I have bottles of Opana and Kadian doing the same thing. Sucks. In response to some of these offers, I have declined to order these, instead deciding to help my fellow pharmacists by calling around to FIND the product already in stock and let the customer get it that way. Its a little nuts to have to purchase a bottle of 100 to use 7. Or buy 30 Ryzolt to use 7, or buy 30 Cialis to use 3. One of the sneakier measures I saw out there was Clobex. Dr wrote for a small bottle, but the loyalty card was only good for the LARGE bottle . This patient had a percentage copay and the coupon wasn’t a fixed amount.
While the one-time use cards are a pain, the monthly split bill cards are a complete pain in the arse. My computer does not have a place to alert me that a particular rx is a split bill. I either have to make a note of it or just remember it…and neither works very well.
Its also quite apparent that neither the doctor nor the patient tend to read the small print on these cards. These cards that say ” pay no more than XX” for Proxaminaphyl!” dont make it very apparent that they are merely copay-assist cards, they require that the patient’s insurance have covered most of the drug already. When it comes to some of these obscenely expensive topical acne products ( who’s face is worth a $1ooo a month anyway?) many insurance companies balk at covering them already. I wish I had a number of how many times I have sent a prior-auth request to a dermatologist to have him blow me off by saying ” customer has loyalty card” WELL DUH….CANT USE IT, READ THE SMALL PRINT. Some may take $50 off a non covered item, but when you are talking about a $300 to $500 product, it makes no difference to the patient. All they see is ” Pay no more than $25″.
I’ve also turned a way a score of Medicare D recipients with $4 Lipitor cards. ” Try simvastatin”. I tell them.
I have my own solution, of which nobody would ever put into practice….For every loyalty card promo, there has to be a package size available to utilize that promo. If Big Pharma wants to offer a “free 7 tabs of Molaryl” then Molaryl needs to come in a 7 tablet promo size available for purchase. Putting aside my made up drug names, lets put a face to this: Ryzolt–make a 7 tab package size if you insist on only offering 7 free. Cialis, step up and do the same: market a 3 tab starter packet.
Of course, if I was king of the world, I’d have abolished all of the cards anyway.
Just my monday morning rant…
The Pharmacy Chick is a retail pharmacist in the Western United States, gutting it out in fairly busy store. She ticks off each day as one more day closer to retirement, after 22 years in the biz. She remembers typewriters, rolls of labels, want books, and everybody paid cash. Now all she wants to remember is what all her passwords are!
The viewpoint expressed in this article is the opinion of the author and is not necessarily the viewpoint of the owners or employees at Healthcare Staffing Innovations, LLC.
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