Whether it is a hospital, clinic, or convenience store pharmacy, keeping track of your drugs is crucial to running a safe, successful pharmacy. Doing your own inventory is time consuming and often not very efficient. There are many reasons to hire pharmacy inventory services instead of doing the work yourself.
1. You Don’t Have the Equipment
If you do not have the equipment to complete the inventory yourself, you will have to do all of the work by hand. Counting every single pill, cream, ointment, bottle, and box would be incredibly time consuming and inefficient. Businesses offering pharmacy inventory services have handheld PCs to catalog everything in your possession. They are loaded with a major electronic database to provide instant feedback about each entry.
Also, if you were to attempt inventory yourself, you would have to essentially run inventory twice. You would need to count once for inpatient pricing and then again for outpatient/340b pricing. With a team of professionals, you don’t have to worry about the differing prices, as they will handle it for you.
2. You Don’t Want to Deal with Piles of Raw Data
If you choose to do inventory by yourself, without the proper equipment you will end up with piles of raw data. Then you have to sift through the mounds of information to sort them into different schedules of controlled substances to determine which drug belongs under which classification. After you spend that considerable amount of time, you still will not have a useful collection of information.
Just as you are an expert in dispensing care to your patients, specialists are experts in crunching numbers.
3. You Don’t Have the Necessary Employees
Depending on the size of your pharmacy, you might only have a few employees. If you do not have the amount of employees needed to complete the task efficiently, it can take a very long time. If your employees were already working full time, you would then have to pay them overtime to complete inventory. This could very quickly get very expensive. Pharmacy inventory services offer a way to deliver a quick, reliable job without overworking or overpaying your employees. Let the skilled experts handle the tedious business of counting items so your employees don’t have to dread inventory day all year long.
4. You Are Too Busy
In a private business, you might be able to conduct inventory before your pharmacy opens. This isn’t possible for a hospital that never closes. A skilled and unobtrusive organization such as Quality Inventory Services will work quietly and efficiently while you go about your day. This way, the skilled professionals will not interrupt your normal daily workflow. You can continue dispensing the care that you need and the inventory specialists can keep track of your drugs.
