Maintaining high compliance levels, especially compliance with primary vendors can maximize pharmacies’ profit margins and empower them to negotiate even better terms. Consistent adherence to pricing and reimbursement also fosters trust with vendors while ensuring financial stability.
Strategic pharmacy management and operations is multi-faceted and involves mastering the complex world of contracts and compliance. This includes navigating agreements with primary vendors, group purchasing organizations (GPOs), and buying groups. In this blog post, we’ll explore some of the top challenges pharmacies face regarding compliance and how they can leverage better insights and smart purchasing to power their compliance.
Challenges in Achieving Compliance
Balancing one contract’s terms and conditions is complex, let alone managing multiple agreements and relationships. A pharmacy may partner with a primary vendor and a GPO, both offering competitive products at different prices. Should you pick the best-priced item, the one you need immediately, or prioritize the primary vendor’s source item over the GPO? These decisions require time and staff resources and confidence in the data used to make informed choices.
It’s hard to look at the primary vendor agreement (PVA) and know where your tiers are for your generic compliance. Often a lot of pharmacies are buying outside because they get that instant savings right there, but then they end up missing a tier or two in their agreement with their wholesaler, missing a percentage off their generics. The savings they got upfront from another vendor is not as much as they would have gotten had they put those dollars back to their wholesaler and hit the next tier or two.
Regardless of your contracting parties or the number of contracts you manage, diverse terms and conditions influence your purchasing approach. Tracking compliance and aligning purchases across team members and locations is no easy task. Moreover, ensuring vendors deliver the correct products while your team follows your purchasing strategy compounds the complexity. Read more >
