It’s easy to make generalizations about the pharmaceutical industry, because nearly every bit of news is about how a pharmacy has been robbed, involved in a prescription medication scam, or how drug manufacturers have distributed medications that aren’t entirely safe to take but will create a lot of profit. Let’s face it: a lot of the news about pharmacies these days isn’t even about the pharmacies themselves, and it doesn’t really accurately portray how important pharmacies are in the big scheme of things.
So on that note, let’s just take a minute and look at how small pharmacies play a big role in the pharmaceutical industry.
- According to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), nearly 50% of all Americans at any time have used at least one prescription drug within the past 30 days.
- That percentage isn’t too surprising, either, considering that between 2007 and 2010, physician office visits resulted in about 2.6 billion prescriptions handed out, and over three-quarters of all medical visits involved some sort of drug therapy.
- Furthermore, patients receiving prescription medications aren’t limited to those in private doctor’s offices — during the same period, over 285 million prescriptions were either ordered or provided by hospital outpatient medical facilities, and hospital emergency rooms provided over 271 million medications to patients between 2007 and 2010.
- Clearly, independent pharmacies played a big role in making this happen, since individual patients all need somewhere that will fill their prescriptions (legally and safely). The most recent data about sales in private pharmacies shows that, in 2013, drug stores in the U.S. had over $237 billion in sales revenue.
- And last but not least, it should be noted that there’s one thing helping every pharmacy be a successful independent business: a good POS system. According to data from 2014 studies, it’s estimated that the global industry of POS systems is worth an estimated $3.2 billion.
Now, more so than ever before, retail pharmacy POS systems come with the most advanced security features and space-saving terminals, so that even the smallest of pharmacies can process as many prescription transactions and over-the-counter sales as necessary. More research here.
