Physician dispensing continues to grow as a mechanism for practices to supplement their revenue and extend their service to patients. Simply put, physician dispensing is the act of providing medications to patients in lieu of going to a pharmacy. In most states, prescribers are authorized to dispense pharmaceuticals to their own patients. Normally, the practitioner provides prepackaged medications in unit-of-use sizes. This means that the drugs are packaged in the dispensed size so the physician or nurse practitioner doesn’t have to count pills.
There are many companies playing in the physician dispensing market. Most of them are brokers that resell products sitting on a distributors shelves. There are a handful of companies that maintain state and federal licensure to distribute pharmaceuticals. Typically, clinics purchase generic products for their clinic dispensing programs. Some clinics purchase programs to accept insurance but this typically creates another level of complexity with minimal profit to the practice.
