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
The Stokes & Bova Partnership: Transforming Veterinary Medicine
Our sister division, Stokes Pharmacy, and the Bova Group have almost parallel stories—pharmacies with retail roots that expanded into compounding to better serve a larger audience with the highest quality medications possible. Both organizations have made a significant impact in the countries they serve—Stokes in the US and Bova in Australia and the United Kingdom—and they’ve both raised the bar for quality of care in veterinary medicine. In the Spring of 2024, the two organizations announced they were partnering to bring life-saving treatment for cats with feline infectious peritonitis (FIP) to the United States. Since the announcement and the availability of the treatment, GS-441524, Stokes Pharmacy has successfully treated thousands of patients. The partnership didn’t end with the rollout of GS-441524. Soon, we will be announcing the availability of Omeprazole Injection for horses—a first in the United States and made possible through our collaboration with Bova Group. Together, our groups are changing the lives of pet owners and veterinarians alike. We are excited to work hand-in-hand with a group that is as dedicated to transforming veterinary care as Stokes Healthcare is. Brett Davidson, former Bova National Sales Manager in Australia and new Stokes Healthcare (Stokes and Epicur) National Equine Sales Manager, shares his unique insider’s perspective on how the two organizations are changing the landscape of veterinary medicine. Brett, tell us about your previous work at Bova and a brief background about the company. So, I worked at Bova for 16 years in Australia. I launched the expansion of the company with Nick Bova, the owner, so you could say I was employee number one, I suppose. Nick took over in 2008 after finishing his pharmacy degree. I started the same year, and we built the business in Australia from there. And then in 2017, Nick went to the UK and started that office, focusing on specialty medications for UK veterinarians. Emma Jones, Sales Director for Bova UK, was one of the first ones to help him there. And now, Bova has grown to what it is today. Because I knew the company so well, I was a jack of all trades, but my main role was organizing my sales team and our customer relationships. I worked with a lot of corporate accounts, buying groups, larger hospitals, and specialty centers. I supported my team however was most valuable to make sure we keep our clients. And now you’ve joined the Stokes Healthcare team! Tell us how that move came about and your new role. It’s great here, and I’m thrilled to be part of the team. The story of how it all happened isn’t particularly exciting, ha! I noticed that Stokes Healthcare was advertising for an Equine Sales Account Manager, so I reached out to Michael Tursi to discuss the role and his vision for it. True to form, Michael was very open and accommodating, making it easy to have an honest conversation about the opportunity. Given my experience with some of the equine products that Epicur and Stokes are launching, I’m hopeful that I can help the team break into the equine market here in the U.S. I’m really enjoying this new challenge, learning a lot, and having a great time working alongside such a dedicated team. Back to your start at Bova and the expansion – what was the vision for expanding Bova into compounding and the veterinary market? Bova chemists had been around for years, with Nick’s dad starting the business in 1968. In Australia, a pharmacy can only be owned by a pharmacist, it can’t be owned by a group or corporate, so Nick took over the retail pharmacy after graduating from university and Bova started compounding at the same time. At first, it wasn’t specifically for veterinary medicine, we were just doing compounding for human medicine, but we had a lot of the big box retail pharmacies starting to take over. They would buy a number of pharmacies in different locations, and then reduce their margins considerably. Being that Bova was an independent, we would have had to compete with these larger corporate types of pharmacies that are known for cutting prices. So, instead of trying to compete on a retail pharmacy level, Nick explored what else might be available. That’s when he came across compounding and decided that would be the direction he’d prefer to go in rather than trying to compete on price. What sets Bova apart from other compounders? In Australia, Bova built its foundations on the quality of what they do and innovation. To be honest, they are the only compounder in Australia that has continued to release new products for the veterinary industry. So, whether it’s a long-acting injection or a combination of medications for behavior or anxiety, Bova has always been first to the market with a new product. Competitors will usually follow after a year or two and release the same products. Bova is always trying to find new ways to help treat veterinary patients, that’s how they’ve really built a reputation for innovation. I think the GS tablets are a perfect example of that. We were the only ones in the world, for a long time, that had that product, and we worked with a lot of international KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) to get it right and release it. It was amazing to be a part of. And then, in Australia, it’s a differentiator how we focus a lot on quality. There are no kind of regulatory agencies actively monitoring pharmacies with compounding as much as they do in the US or the UK. Obviously, you still have the pharmacy councils and boards, but there’s no system in place where pharmacies or pharmacists can acquire certain licenses or approvals, like 503A or 503B in the US, to make certain products their facilities don’t have. At Bova, we implemented our own kind of quality assurance program based on GMP guidelines, or good manufacturing practices, which is the same as the pharmaceutical standard that Epicur has to reach.
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Advancements in Compounding – A Commitment to Integrity and Quality
The following blog is written by Epicur Pharma’s Advisory Council member Jamie Rauscher, LVT. Jamie is the current president of the National Association of Veterinary Technicians in America, vice president of the Georgia Veterinary Technician & Assistant Association, and part owner and medical manager of the Animal Hospital of Towne Lake. Below, Jamie shares her perspective on the advancements in compounding based on her visit to the Stokes Healthcare facility. From Jamie Recently, I had the opportunity to visit Stokes Healthcare, the parent company of Stokes Pharmacy and Epicur Pharma in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey. My tour of their facility was not what I had expected. I was blown away by what I saw. As a new member of the Stokes/Epicur Advisory Council, I initially sat down and had a get-to-know-you and update session with the Director of Marketing and one of the owners of the company. We talked about new things to come into their world from a pharmacy point of view and the things that they had worked on that they had been successful with in the past. The Complexities of Laws and Regulations around Compounding We also discussed updated pharmacy regulations regarding compounding laws. Part of our conversation centered around new compounded medications, like the FIP treatment, Bova GS-441524, and the impact they will have on our profession. There is a lot of misinformation out there, especially because the black market has made those desperate for a solution compromise their best judgment and purchase medications from companies with NO regulations. There finally is a viable treatment in the United States and Stokes’ partnership with BOVA made it happen. Treatment for FIP is now Available! Learn more about the life-saving medication and order today! Bova GS-441524 A Seat at the Table as a Technician Being asked for my input along with being recognized for my knowledge base and expertise as a technician was refreshing and appreciated. Technicians spend a large portion of their time communicating with owners about the medications that have been prescribed and the best way to obtain and administer them. Creativity is the key more often than not. When touring their compounding facilities, being able to see the behind-the-scenes part of their process was eye-opening. The protocols that are put in place for sterility and quality control are amazing. Being able to see these things in person gave me a whole new respect for their compounding pharmacies. The size of their businesses, their growth history, and their continued focus on integrity and quality make me hopeful for our profession. Explore our 503B Facility! Training Equipment Facility Testing Quality Control And More! Witnessing these things in person also allowed me to get a better sense of how the company works and will let me continue to grow in my partnership with the Epicur/Stokes family. I am a proud supporter! Thank you for sharing these insights, Jamie! More Resources New USP Guidelines: What Changes Impact My Veterinarian Practice? 3 Reasons You Should Make the Switch to a 503B Pharmacy Partner 503A or 503B—Knowing When to Order from Each One
