Blog: Manage Multiple Pharmacy Locations

If you have a passion for people and an entrepreneurial spirit, you might just be a pharmacy owner.

Rather than serving on staff, owners take matters into their own hands and tackle their practice independently. On the road to ownership, they develop business skills to pair with clinical skills, and over time, they learn to make patient care profitable.

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Of course, owners face their fair share of obstacles along the way: from meeting state requirements to managing finances to leading a team of pharmacists, techs, and support staff.

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For most owners, though, the opportunity to step up and serve outweighs any challenges that may arise.

And for some owners, one pharmacy just isn’t enough.

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Once You Catch the Business Bug

Statistics show that 27% of independent pharmacy owners own two or more pharmacies — proving that when you catch the business bug, there’s no stopping. Owning multiple pharmacies can be a big undertaking, but it can provide even bigger opportunities.

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With more facilities, more resources, and more staff, you can treat more patients and have more opportunities to put your name on the map. In each location you open, you can implement new services and experiment with new workflow practices to run your business even better.

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By making the right adjustments, you can bring in more revenue and open up new chances for advancement.

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Most importantly, though, you can establish yourself as a trusted resource for patients in and out of your community.

If you’re planning on taking the plunge and opening up a second, third, or even fourth pharmacy location, make sure that you have the capabilities to do it. This means investing time, money, and technology to get your next storefront up and running. Investment doesn’t have to be difficult, either.

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Set aside a few hours every week, save up your spare change, and pick a pharmacy software system that can support your practice from start to finish, no matter if you have one location or one hundred.

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Keep Your Operations Under the Same Roof

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In the past, different locations relied on different software systems to stay up and running.

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Each software system recorded and stored its own unique data, which could only be accessed at that particular location. This made it impossible for multi-location owners — who often travel in and out of different pharmacies — to get information from all of their locations at once.

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As a result, operations were often delayed and valuable insights were missed. Even today, many vendors still require pharmacies to use separate systems for separate locations.

The top vendors, though, are working to change the game.

Using new and innovative technology, the top vendors can connect multiple locations together within one central database. They can take information from each store’s software system and put it all together for easy access on a single system.

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From the database, owners can access information of all kinds, including:

Dispensing processes
Prescription and product pricing
Inventory stock
Point-of-sale transactions
Prescriber information
Patient profiles
Accounts receivable
Financial and operational reports

For multi-location owners, a central database is essential. With this capability, you can save time, effort, and energy on pharmacy management — not to mention thousands of miles spent traveling back and forth between locations.

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No matter whether you’re at home or in the office, you can access all of your information at any time. It doesn’t get any more efficient than that.

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One System to Rule Them All

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If you’re looking to optimize your operations as a pharmacy owner, pick a software system that can power all of your locations.

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Not every vendor offers a central database, though, so it’s important to schedule a demo and see which capabilities which vendor offers. Find out what they’re doing to support multi-location owners like you and how their technology can keep you going and growing.