Pharmacists, you need a cash pricing plan now, and AI could be the answer.
By: Prescryptive Health
With high-deductible health plans on the rise, your customers are looking for savings solutions. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help you stay profitable while serving more customers.
Why AI Pricing could be the key to pharmacy profitability
In our recent Rewriting the Script Report, 31% of respondents said they primarily pay out of pocket for their medications and 61% of insured individuals have paid out of pocket despite having insurance. The biggest driver of this payment approach: High-deductible health plans.
A big hurdle for pharmacists: Many of them don’t have a reliable pricing strategy in place to effectively service these cash payers. And it’s taking valuable time away from their core focus: helping patients. More than half (55%) of the pharmacists responding to the survey said they spend 2 to 6 hours reviewing drug prices weekly, and 42% spend more time each week than they did two years ago. A third aren’t confident their staff prices medications consistently for cash-paying patients. And patients are taking notice: Nearly a third aren’t sure their independent pharmacy prices their medications accurately.
Enter AI Pricing — the smarter pricing path to pharmacy profitability.
AI is so much more than robot movies. It’s intelligent technology, and it’s making a major impact on pharmacies across the country. In fact, 62% of the independent pharmacy decision makers we surveyed said AI has the greatest ability to positively disrupt the pharmacy landscape over the next 1-2 years. As more patients look to pay less for their prescriptions, community pharmacists need solutions that empower customers and grow their business.
AI provides nearly limitless opportunities to better connect with patients and maximize profitability. To save you some time, we’ve narrowed the list down to five pharmacy-transforming benefits. Take a look:
AI Pricing:
5 predictably profitable benefits
1. Personalized analytics with actionable recommendations
Every pharmacy and its patient demographics are unique. A family-run store in a town of 1,500 has a different set of attributes and challenges than a major chain in the middle of a bustling city. Humans look at these attributes and make strategic decisions based on experience and expertise. AI has the power to look at a multitude of dimensions and come up with data-driven insights that lead to opportunities and solutions our brains might never even consider.
2. Insurmountable information intelligence
AI ingests and processes massive amounts of information and analyzes that data for trends based on any number of inputs including location, demographics, seasonality, and, in the case of prescription drugs, therapeutic type and usage. Applying this intelligence to the guesswork of drug pricing can increase profitability and efficiency while still balancing what patients want and need.
3. Data visualizations down to the drug level
AI-based pricing uses data-driven insights and expert analytics to provide accurate, profitable pricing that flexes by drug and fairly positions a pharmacy against other stores, big and small. Ultimately, AI can help determine the elasticity of drug pricing, breaking down the complexity of it with sophistication while offering real recommendations on how to price your top medications.
4. Total transparency
Through claims data analyzation and competitor pricing evaluation, AI can contribute to making drug pricing more transparent by finding ways to bring trust to the surface, and push money back to the pharmacy and the consumer.
5. Happy customers and a healthy bottom line
Communities count on their local pharmacies to help them take care of themselves in the most convenient ways possible. And keeping people healthy will always be at the heart of why pharmacists do what they do. But healthy profits are important too. With smart tech tools in place, hardworking independent pharmacists can stay focused on keeping customers happy while boosting their bottom lines. And that’s a win-win no matter how you analyze it.
Want even more independent pharmacy insights?
Get the full Rewriting the Script Report.