Another class of pharmacy intern graduates has arrived. Here are a few popular ways you can leverage a pharmacy intern in your pharmacy.
The job market for pharmacists is soft, like butter outside in the summer soft. Chain pharmacy salaries are plummeting, hospitals aren’t hiring, and new graduates need a job. Independent pharmacy owners are in the perfect position to employ recent pharmacist graduates while developing their pharmacy profits.
The Pharmacy Job Totem Pole
For so many years, our profession looked at retail pharmacy as the entry-level pharmacist job. This position wasn’t considered “clinical enough.” Being a retail pharmacist myself, I never understood this. On any given day, a retail pharmacist could be:
…looking at a patient’s rash
…catching deadly drug interactions
…trying to decipher an Rx written by an ER doctor in the middle of the night who is now off-duty and can’t be reached
…helping a family pick the proper OTC medications for their baby.
Plus, answering phones, dealing with insurances, and managing staff. It is a much more dynamic position and requires a higher skill set than even other pharmacists realize. On top of all these critical activities, there are a plethora of clinical opportunities as well. Most pharmacy owners haven’t implemented clinical programs because they don’t have time or the budget to get them up and going. This problem is where pharmacy interns and graduates can be the key to success.
Pharmacy Intern Graduates Owning Their Future
With the job market being bleak, many new pharmacists are open to opportunities they may not have considered in the past. Pharmacy interns are more willing to have skin in the game. They are no longer expecting big paychecks for simply filling prescriptions. I have recently helped several owners create programs for intern graduates that are a win-win for the pharmacy and the pharmacist.
Many of these options have a small number of hours doing the typical pharmacist work. For this work, the new pharmacist will earn the usual hourly wage. For the rest of the time, the new pharmacist is creating their future. They are building new revenue streams for the pharmacy and themself. The pharmacy intern benefits from using the pharmacy’s reputation and infrastructure while putting in the sweat equity into implementing the chosen program.
The New Pay Scale
This brave new world of pharmacy development and employment needs a new pay scale to match. The pharmacy intern should be rewarded for the fruits of their labor, and the pharmacy should be reimbursed for hard costs. A revenue split is typically the best way to structure compensation in this model. Here’s an example using PGx testing as a sample:
- Total revenue for the month $3,600
- Minus ad costs (in this case $0)
- 75% to the pharmacy intern ($2,700)
- 25% to the pharmacy owner ($900)
Now the pharmacy intern graduate could complete the PGx tests above with just a portion of their time. They could also do nutrition consults, remote patient monitoring, weight loss classes, or functional medicine testing. There are many revenue opportunities, and certainly, the pharmacist could pursue more than one.
This type of revenue splitting creates an opportunity for the new pharmacist with no ceiling and allows the pharmacy owners to develop new revenue streams with low startup costs. You can customize this plan to suit your individual needs.
Popular and Profitable Revenue Streams
If you have an eager pharmacy intern graduate that is ready to create their own success, here are our most favorite opportunities they can consider:
- PGx Testing – Up to $90 per interpretation. RxGenomix provides all the training and amazing software to make it extremely easy.
- Supplements – Many strategies to increase sales; our favorite is using a biophotonic scanner to measure patients’ antioxidant levels.
- CBD – Ananda Professional and PharmaCanna carry our favorite CBD products.
- (RPM) Remote Patient Monitoring – Drive revenue to physicians and the pharmacy. TM Pharmacy Consulting is what we highly recommend.
- Worker’s Comp – Even just a few patients can have a massive impact on the bottom line.
- Functional Medicine – Creating revenue from cash consultations to testing to supplements can be easy to do with the proper knowledge.
- Therapy Optimization – Opportunities for better therapy for patients and an improved bottom line for pharmacies still exist. Some great new products are coming out soon, like this one, Clemastine Liquid.
- Compound Prescriptions – There is ample opportunity for cash compounds and a few for insurance billing.
For more information on any of these topics, or if you need help crafting your own pharmacy intern graduate business development plan, just email us at info@diversifyrx.com.
