Pharmacy IMS Issue

[Steve T]

Hi Everyone,

New to the board, but have an urgent issue that I'm currently experiencing with one of the primary pharmacies that I detail.

They are a smaller independent pharmacy company, that recently added an LTC pharmacy to their pharmacy line. Apparently, once that pharmacy opened, every other pharmacy was reclassified as an LTC pharmacy as well, completely messing up their IMS reporting and our data tracking as well!

They have since been working with IMS, who states that the appropriate pharmacies have been switched back to the retail side. There are even emails to prove it, so I know the pharmacy is doing their part.

Unfortunately, their data is still not showing up and it's KILLING our numbers. This pharmacy does a REALLY good job with all of our scripts, so ideally I want to keep this pharmacy and hope that we can figure this issue out.

Has anyone had any experience with an issue like this or know of any details they can share with me to help solve this issue? I would GREATLY appreciate it.

 

[anonymous]

Unfortunately the data is sampled (i.e. only some pharmacies deliver data to IMS) and them projected (with a defective projection algorithm). So unless the pharmacy concerned supplies data to IMS you will never get full credit for you better accounts.

IMS are fully aware that there projection algorithms are defective, but they won't admit it - that would mean fixing the data and having to explain why many reps were let go in error.

 

[anonymous]

Same issue here. Huge account that switched to a new pharmacy, everything is projected now and big decrease in market volume. How does a ltc pharmacy go about reporting to ims? Does it cost them anything? What's in it for the pharmacy?

 

[anonymous]

good luck