Physician Outreach builds script counts

There are many ways a pharmacy operation can measure success; the most basic is to fill more prescriptions today than yesterday.

Ryan Merrell, head of marketing for Spence’s Pharmacy, a Health Mart pharmacy in Logan, Utah, is among many independent pharmacies who are using McKesson’s Physician Outreach Program to do just that by benchmarking total prescription share against their local market and helping to identify and build relationships with high prescribers in their areas — in real time.

According to a recent McKesson study, Physician Outreach subscribers have experienced a 1.8% average increase in fills after using it for more than 6 months, with the most active subscribers experiencing up to a 7% increase.

One area in which Spence’s has been able to establish an important niche is in compounding. “With Physician Outreach, I’m able to easily identify the prescribers whose patients will benefit from our compounding services,” said Merrell, a licensed pharmacy technician since the age of 15 years. “As a result, we’ve doubled the number of compounding scripts we [filled] in the past year.”