You’ve started a weight management program (WMP) in your practice, you’ve established a relationship with a compounding pharmacy that offers injectable semaglutide and tirzepatide and they’re licensed in your state. You even have patients that have completed their lab work and signed up for the medications. But how do get the meds to them? Here are several options.
Direct ship or drop ship from the compounding pharmacy to the patient
After a patient signs up for the medication through your practice, you have to place their “order” with the compounding pharmacy just like any prescription you fill with a pharmacy (compounding or traditional). The pharmacy needs the patients name and basic demographic info to fill the prescription.
Since you’re submitting the prescription to the compounding pharmacy anyway, it would be natural to have the pharmacy ship the medications directly to the patient. That sounds convenient and easy but there are some drawbacks. First off, the cost to your practice will be more since the pharmacy will be sending not only the medication, but also the supplies to perform the once per week injections.
The second issue is that you’re dependent on the pharmacy to fill the prescription based on their turnaround time. If the time between placing the order and shipping to the patient is only a couple days, no problem. But if it’s 1 to 2 weeks, then the patient’s automated subscription charges will be significantly “off” from the delivery of their meds.
The other issue is if they’re sending a vial to the patient with syringes, that means the patient must know how to draw up the right amount of medication for each weekly injection. And don’t forget the dosage increases each month so the patient must know how much to draw up each week, which changes each month!
If this is the route you take, one way to avoid the trouble of patients knowing how much to draw up each week is to ask the pharmacy to draw up prefilled syringes in their compliant sterile environment so that no contaminants are introduced into the syringe. From there, they can send to the patient.
But if they don’t want to ship prefilled syringes to the patient, and will only send the vial with 4 empty syringes, then you’ll need an instructional video to teach the patient how to draw up the medication appropriately. If you’re a subscriber to the BuildMyHealth WMP, we have this video available on our password protected Tutorials page here.
As you scale and grown the number of subscribers in your WMP, you might want to consider another option.
Shipping meds to the office and then shipping to patients
By having the medication delivered directly to your practice, you have the freedom to either ship the medication to the patient yourself or having the patient come in for their injection. The other benefit of “stockpiling” the patient’s medication in your office is you can ship the medication to them on schedule, every month, when their automatic subscription charge is processed. [Not processing charges automatically but manually each month?! Then contact us for a demo of our BuildMyHealth WMP software that automates the monthly charges associated with subscriptions.] This removes the potential delay associated with the turnaround time between ordering and the compounding pharmacy shipping out the medication.
If you ship the medication to the patient, they still need to know how to do the injections. But there’s one other benefit of having a good relationship with the compounding pharmacy. You can have them send customized vials with only enough medication to cover the patient for a month. Usually when compounding pharmacies ship out vials, it may be enough medication for a couple months. Well, you can’t afford to send a patient a couple month’s worth of medication if they only paid for one month.
So you can have the compounding pharmacy ship you a 1mg vial for example, enough for four 0.25mg doses in the first month of the patient’s treatment. By the time they get to the maximum 2.4mg per dose shot, you can send them a customized 9.6mg vial. This way, the patient knows they’re taking four equal doses that will get them through the month, removing a lot of guesswork.
Ready to Start a weight Management Program?
Not sure where to begin? BuildMyHealth WMP (Weight Management Program) offers an easy to follow blueprint, including sourcing of your compounded medication. Get started by clicking here to learn more and get started.
Already have a growing weight management program but want to scale from dozens to hundreds or thousands of patients?! The BuildMyHealth WMP automation software can get you there! Never again will you have to worry about collecting payments or getting updated cards when payments fail. We can help you with online payments 24/7, credit card dunning, or missing out on a lead from someone interested in your program after eating that last slice of late-night pizza! Don’t make this hard on the prospective patient. Because “if you make it easy, they will pay!” Click here to automate your weight management program today.
