Cash & Carry Dispensing
Cash and carry (private pay) medication dispensing is the most common and typically the most efficient and profitable type of dispensing program for most private practices. Whether or not your patients have prescription insurance coverage, cash and carry medication dispensing provides your patients with a convenient, confidential, and cost-effective alternative to picking up their prescriptions at the pharmacy.
Benefits of Cash & Carry Medication Dispensing
Pricing – Cash & carry medication dispensing is the most cost-effective way to provide medications to your patients at the point of care. When billing patients’ prescription insurance, Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) take a large cut of the medication profit, resulting in reimbursements to your practice that are often substantially lower than what you’d receive from a cash and carry patient. With PharmaLink’s pricing, you have plenty of room to mark up medications to earn a profit, while still providing cost savings to your patients relative to their cash cost or copay at the pharmacy.
- Predictability – Unlike billing prescription insurance, your medication cost and profit are completely transparent and predictable. With insurance-based medication dispensing, the reimbursements you receive can fluctuate, and you may end up losing money (receiving a reimbursement that is lower than what you paid to purchase the medication).
- Timing – Get paid immediately instead of waiting for unpredictable insurance reimbursements to arrive.
- Simplicity – Cash & carry medication dispensing is the most streamlined type of dispensing program available. By eliminating insurance billing from the equation, you also eliminate the preauthorization process and all the painful administrative burden on your staff (phone calls, faxes, and paperwork).
Patient Decision Making Process
- Patients with prescription insurance coverage will decide where to purchase their medications (from the pharmacy or directly from your practice) based on convenience, confidentiality, and cost. When comparing the cost of medications, patients will compare the cash cost at your practice to their copay at the pharmacy. PharmaLink’s competitive medication pricing will allow you to mark up the medications you purchase from us (earn a profit) and still offer patient prices that are competitive with most prescription insurance copays, creating a win-win proposition for your practice and your patients.
- Patients without prescription insurance coverage will compare your prices to their cash cost at the pharmacy. For commonly prescribed medications, your patients will almost always save money (and time by skipping the trip to the pharmacy) by purchasing medications directly from your practice at the point of care.
- For medications you don’t commonly prescribe, or for high-cost, branded, or specialty medications, you can always send your patients’ prescriptions to the pharmacy as you normally would. As part of the initial setup, PharmaLink is happy to review your prescribing history to recommend the best initial formulary for your practice, free of charge.
Practice Compliance Issues
The biggest challenge for practices is maintaining compliance with various regulations, such as labeling, medication storage, and PDMP reporting requirements. PharmaLink will be your partner along the way to make sure you follow all regulations. In fact, our software is built to make compliance a breeze. Most of the PDMP reporting is automated, and our system will automatically print a compliant patient label as part of the dispensing process.
Cash & carry medication dispensing programs are easy to set up and operate successfully with no additional staff needed. With PharmaLink, the process is fast, easy, automated and compliant. Once you contact us to begin the process, your office can be up and running in as little as 72 hours if all requirements are met.
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