Medical Weight Loss Services Could Be Good for Your Practice

The quest continues.  What else can you offer to add value to existing and future patients?  Oh, and it might be nice if it also generated additional revenue for the practice.  We continue to see successful examples of practitioners implementing medical weight loss services in their clinics.  The best programs take a balanced approach offering nutrition & exercise counseling, dietary products and medications as part of their solutions.  Many clinics see a tremendous increase in patients as they extend their services to include physician-directed weight loss services.

Here are a few reasons medical weight loss services could be beneficial to your practice and your patients:

1. Many patients are not good candidates for gastric bypass surgery and must therefore look for other alternatives to help them manage the disease called obesity.
2. Physicians typically prescribe a narrow range of medications for weight-loss management.  A smaller, targeted formulary is easier to manage from a clinic perspective.
3. Because weight management is an ongoing battle, physician-directed weight management often requires that patients be on medications for extended periods.  This increases the practice’s opportunity to dispense medications and provide convenient service to patients.
4. The nature of obesity is complex from a psychological as well as a physiological perspective.  Allowing the patient to receive treatment and products in the safe environment of the clinic avoids extra trips to the pharmacy and long waits for medications.
5. From a business perspective, a weight management program adds service fees as well as product fees.  These patients are typically cash-pay which improves cash flow and collections.  In addition, the recurring nature of the relationship offsets the periodic nature of acute treatments and annual exams.
6. A service with strong demand like weight loss management helps build momentum throughout your practice.  Weight loss patients will require care in addition to the weight management services.  Existing patients may become interested in different aspects of your weight management services.  At the very least, you can create a dialog around your patient’s overall health and ways they can be proactive in improving it.

Depending on the number of patients, medication dispensing in a bariatric clinic can be overwhelming.  Clinics sometimes purchase bulk bottles and count out pills for patient prescriptions.  This is incredibly time consuming and completely unnecessary. Northwind Pharmaceuticals offers prepackaged medications; this means that we break the bulk bottles into smaller, unit-of-use bottles.  For example, some of our clinics will dispense Phentermine 37.5mg in 21 count, 30 count, 45 count and 60 count bottles.  Our bottles are labeled according to FDA and state pharmacy board guidelines; the clinic will need to place a label with the patient’s name, instructions and clinic name on the bottle to make it a legal prescription.  In short, we make pharmaceutical dispensing easy for you.

Northwind’s dispensing systems include a manual labeling approach or cloud-based software to print labels and track inventory.  Our goal is to make office medication dispensing quick and easy for you and your  patients.