For veterinary hospitals, keeping 503B manufactured drugs on-hand for office use and dispensing is critical to top-quality patient care. But stocking these manufactured products provides another opportunity for veterinary staff—building stronger client relationships.
With 503B drugs on hand, you can deepen client relationships in ways that can’t be replaced by online pharmacies. It gives you the opportunity to provide the highest quality medication, consulting services on storage and administration, and added convenience. Below we take a deeper dive into three important ways your 503B medication stock will improve vet-client relationships and build loyalty for your practice.
By federal law, veterinary hospitals can legally stock and dispense our manufactured drugs. Traditional 503A compounding pharmacies were never intended to provide office stock as the intent was to provide individual patient prescriptions.
Quality builds trust and loyalty
It’s common for online retailers, unauthorized pharmacies, and street vendors to sell counterfeit pet medications—often at a large discount—that resemble the real thing. Sadly, over 1 in 10 pet owners have been duped by online counterfeit pet medications. These imitations pose a real threat to pets because of their incorrect dosing, unknown active ingredients, or no ingredients at all.
Offering reliable, high-quality medications to your clients directly from your practice increases client confidence and trust. You and your client can come out of an appointment knowing the medication is coming from a reputable source where products are manufactured with extensive testing for purity and stability, meets their pet’s needs, and it’s in a dosage form or flavor that makes at-home treatment easier.
According to a study published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, clients are 40% more likely to follow veterinary recommendations when communication is clear, thorough, and trustworthy. That’s why it’s so important to be thorough with the information you share about treatment recommendations and medication instructions. It provides a great opportunity to educate pet owners on reputable pharmacies.
Reinforce your consultative role
Veterinarians are the people whom pet owners trust the most, influenced more by the knowledge, quality of care, and compassion given than by price or convenience. Having a positive relationship with a pet owner creates better opportunities to counsel clients on proper medication storage and usage.
To further the trust between the vet and the client, the relationship should exist beyond the appointment. A follow-up phone call regarding at-home treatment enhances the level of care and helps a client know they can depend on their veterinary staff. Research shows one of the main reasons clients switch vets is due to confusing communication and treatment recommendations. Following through, providing clarity, and fostering a consultative role will strengthen the overall relationship you have with your clients.
Meet pet owners’ needs for convenience
Speed and convenience are essential to nearly any customer experience in today’s increasingly fast-paced world. Retail sales of pet medication purchased online has grown to 16% and allowed online pharmacies to successfully draw from this revenue stream for veterinary hospitals and clinics.
However, by stocking manufactured 503B drugs, veterinary practices can recoup some of this revenue by making high-quality medications readily available to clients. When a client can walk out of the vet’s office with the exact medication they need to give their pet, it eliminates the need to wait on a local (503A) compounding pharmacy or to find a reputable online pharmacy, which may or may not be experiencing a shortage.
Direct dispensing also reduces the stress vet visits can cause for both pets and owners. After diagnosing, explaining, and setting expectations for the new medication with the client, at-home treatment education can get lost in the information overload. With the drug in-house and handed directly to the pet owner, you can take the time to reinforce administration guidance.
Take advantage of ordering with Epicur. All drugs are ready to ship same day with 1-2 days in transit.
When a pet owner walks out the door with no medication in hand, they have many other options where they could purchase their needed veterinary pharmaceuticals. Other well-known stores such as Walmart, PetRx, and Chewy Rx are popular for pet food, supplies, and now pet medications, where clients can fill their prescriptions instead.
Keeping 503B medications in stock helps you provide the safest, highest-quality treatment while reinforcing your trusted relationship.
Partner with Epicur for your bulk stock and dispensing.
Call us at 888-508-5032 to start your order!
More to Read
Meet Mickey O’Connor, Epicur Pharma’s Director of Business Development
Mickey O’Connor has been part of the Stokes and Epicur story from the beginning. With his background as a pharmacist, Mickey brings a unique perspective and advantage to his role as Director of Business Development—both to customers and the company. Read our interview with Mickey to learn more about his role and his insights into all that’s happening at Epicur and in the veterinary field! Mickey, thanks for sharing more about your role on the team. Can you start by telling readers about how you got started with Stokes Healthcare and your current role? I’ve been with the company since the early 2000s. I worked with Emmett and Michael in retail pharmacy in the 90s before they purchased Stokes Pharmacy. My first job here with Stokes was as a sales rep selling human compounded medication. I worked as a pharmacist and as a sales rep for several years, and then, as we grew, I took on several different roles and grew into the role of business development. I’ve done everything from being a sales rep and a pharmacist to working in business development with individual veterinarians, practice managers, and purchasers for veterinary hospitals. Currently, I work with corporate groups to help them better manage their inventory and understand why it’s a benefit to utilize Epicur and Stokes Pharmacy. Can you tell us more about those specific benefits and the work you’re doing with corporate groups? A lot of times, the people who are involved from the corporate groups, whether it’s purchasing or management, are unfamiliar with the medication part. In years past, individual purchasers for the hospitals did a lot of the work as far as ordering medication. But, as the veterinary industry has grown, medication has become more important in the sense that there’s a lot more of it and a lot more options. The purchasing groups started to realize that they needed to look at how their individual locations were getting medication for their hospitals, and how to coordinate it so that there’s consistency throughout each hospital to ensure better medication management and purchasing. So, that’s a lot of the conversations I have with them. There’s still a lack of understanding of the difference between a 503A traditional compounding pharmacy versus a 503B outsourcing facility. When I bring up that topic, most of the time they either know very little about those two or nothing at all about 503B. When I explain it, they start to get a better understanding of the differences and can see how Epicur products can help their overall process of managing medication for the hospitals. A Partner for Better Quality At Stokes Healthcare, our mission is to advance the quality of care in veterinary medicine. We support all clinics, whether independent or part of a corporation, with the highest quality medications that your patients deserve. No matter your practice type, we will make sure your practice needs are our priority! The differences in 503A and 503B can be confusing and there’s still a learning curve to it. Why do you think that is? I think it’s because there’s been a lot of change in the veterinary space over the last 20 years, but more recently, over the last five years. Some veterinarians still want to do things the old way, it’s comfortable and what they are used to. Previously we heard vets and their staff say they used to be able to get whatever they wanted when they wanted it, and there was no problem. There was longer dating on compounded products, and individual pharmacists could kind of do things without certain checks and balances, meaning they were able to put a beyond-use date of six months when the product really wasn’t good for six months. So, really, the industry needed some more regulation. Even though that’s frustrating, we did need that and it’s taking time to educate everyone in the field. Jumping back to your previous experience, it is interesting that you started as a pharmacist. What kind of advantage does your background as a pharmacist give you in Business Development? When we talk about medication, it does give me some more credibility as a pharmacist when I explain why our products are more advantageous. For example, the buprenorphine 0.5 mg/ml injection specifically. I talk about the concentration being different, but it’s an easy calculation for a veterinarian or vet tech to make. And if you’re able to get everyone on board using the buprenorphine injection that Epicur makes, then you have more consistency across all of your facilities. You can put out memos on how to use it, train, and teach. Using that medication is going to help your clinic or corporation as a whole. Plus, there’s the fact that the buprenorphine that Epicur makes has never been out of stock. So, when I share this message, coming from a pharmacist, it does carry more weight. They know I understand the medication, how it works, different concentrations, and they feel like, ‘okay, this is a professional who knows both the business side and the medicine side.’ What was it like switching from human to veterinary medications? It was challenging. Going into compounding was challenging because compounding is different than traditional retail. But the veterinary side was even more challenging because you’re dealing with different strengths and concentrations. A medication that may be good for a human may not be good for a cat or a dog. The hardest part about the compounding side was working as a sales rep. Back when I started with Stokes, around 2002, when you talked to a human medicine doctor about compounding, they didn’t really know what compounding was. So, before I could sell them on who we were and why they should use us, I had to explain to them what compounding was and why compounding, in general, could benefit them and their practice. Mickey and his dog, Cooper! Keep reading to learn more about Cooper. Sounds like the educational curve you mentioned for
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