The economic feasibility of pharmacy patient medication profiles

The advent of prefabrication in the pharmaceutical industry resulted in a steady decline in demand for extemporaneously compounded medicinals, and in a reappraisal of the pharmacist's role in delivering health care. The main thrust of this reappraisal has been to emphasize the pharmacist's convenience and professional services. This paper studies one of the latter class of services. An important finding of this analysis is that patient medication profiles are economically feasible contingent upon the increase in labor resulting from their use. If the increase in labor is 10%, it can be seen that chain pharmacies with daily prescription volumes greater than 75 and nonchain pharmacies with daily volumes greater than 50 could profit from this service. The authors also predict that the market will bear a 6c to 20c increase in price per prescription as reimbursement for this service. The exact amount cannot be predicted with certainty, but the respondents centered around the price of 15c. The probit analysis indicates that a pharmacy with patrons who are older should expect the acceptable price for this service to decrease, while married patrons with no young children in the family who purchase prescriptions frequently, and view the service as important, should be willing to pay more. A major contribution of this paper is the measurement of the monetary value of patient medication profiles and the estimated value of this service to demographic and patronage groups. This measurement, made with the willingness-to-pay criterion, is believed to have its greatest applicability in determining the level at which pharmacists should be reimbursed for the performance of this service. The reimbursement decision should be made by considering the pharmacist's costs, the consumers' willingness to pay, and a negotiated incentive for offering the service. This paper considers only the first 2 factors along with the influence exerted by demographic and patronage variables. But, federal and third-party payers could make decisions on whether or not to offer an incentive to the pharmacist based on the demographic and patronage characteristics of their subscriber population. A second important contribution of this analysis is the measurement of the net monetary value.