Stronger together: One practice’s journey with vRxPro®

Dr. Brent Lakia: You certainly can. It may save you some time on those phone calls I talked about. Sending an email, I think, is a great thing. It gives you an opportunity to communicate with your clients, and give them kind of your voice of what you’re wanting to do and why, and explain the reason for it. At the annual visit, you can even ask them to opt in or opt out, and you can click that in the practice management software so they don’t get the email bombs. There’s absolutely some meeting the clients where they are. When we think about our daily lives, everyone’s expecting a lot of online availability, and more of a marketplace based there. There may be some negative responses at first, because we all know that there are those clients. I wouldn’t let that deter you. When you start seeing these clients that are actually really happy and healthy, and their patients are being helped that’s what matters.

Dr. Brent Lakia: You know, the biggest time saver is that script that’s pre-authorized for medications needing refills. Once clients create a username and password, they could go in and fill the prescription, and it just kept track for us. And if we had already authorized a lot of these refills, it just happened. They didn’t have to go through and read all those prescriptions that came from the other pharmacies. We were able to just make them happen, because they’re already in our system. And if they just have to click on our website to make it happen, it’s much easier than hunting down the doctor to have them hand-cock a script to then send to a competitor. If you prep and plan ahead, it is so much faster, and just the ease of use, makes it work really well.

Dr. Brent Lakia: Honestly, after we did a lot of phone calls with the scripts from other pharmacies, and had the first conversations over a couple of years, and once it was integrated into our culture, I guess those were the two things we needed. We do emails, and those emails are all sent by Covetrus. I get an email the month before, saying, hey, these are the deals we’re running next month, and I’m like, cool, have fun. Peace be with you. And off the emails go, and we just let it run. They’re set up well, they have content, and it tells the story. If I took the time to write that, or if I had a staff member take time to write that, it would take hours, it’d take mental strain of saying, oh my god, I gotta do this by Friday, and it’s not gonna happen. Like, it just wouldn’t, and it wouldn’t be as effective in communicating it, so I’m just thankful that I just pressed go.

Dr. Brent Lakia: Yeah, of course they do. That, I think is unavoidable when we’re using technology. There have been times where there was some software things or some website things that some of our older clients were like, what? Where did this button go? And so we had some of this stuff happen. Our team, because they stay up on this, was only a phone call away to walk them through it. I won’t deny it, some clients just drove to the practice, and we pulled it up on their phone and walked them through it. And our clients were thrilled that we took that time, because they wanted to stay on the online platform. That’s how much they like it, they just needed help to get through it, so yes, there are going to be hiccups, nobody’s going to be perfect at it, but if your team’s well-trained on it, they’re going to help them walk through, and it’s gonna work out great.

Dr. Brent Lakia: When we did this transition and went to vRxPro, we did it completely in concert with our Covetrus rep at the time. So you know, that made it so much smoother, it made it integrate much better, and since then, Haley, has jumped in and been a point person for anything as we’ve changed and grown.

Dr. Brent Lakia: I’ll be honest, I feel most of the time for illness exams, I don’t use the online store very often. The reason is that patient’s already sick, and I need meds to send home. Now, if there’s an online store, that’s great. But, you know, the opportunity is that you still need to have point-of-care medication to take care of those sick patients. I have antibiotics that should not be waiting 3 days to be delivered. Antibiotics need to start today. But if you’re doing a 6-week course because we have something really nasty going on, and they’re like, man, I can buy it for way cheaper if I order it online, cool. We’ll start you on chloramphenicol now, and then order the bigger volume there. And that way, I don’t have to have big bottle sitting on my shelf. Get them rolling, get them going, and honestly, that’s what we do for our prescription diets. All our food is online, we have small bags on the shelf, get people started on the KD, get started on the GI, and then ship them to AutoShip, and it works out really well.