A few days ago I didn’t know what “Same Store Sales” meant. I heard this statistic at Christmas as an indicator of how large retail stores performed. Then I learned that it translates into how much each person spends in the retail store. The amount spent times the number of people visiting the store is an indicator of profit. Now I understand: The higher the “Same Store Sales”, the greater the revenue.
Applying this to the practice of medicine, we see that offering other services, products or vaccines (like the influenza flu vaccine) increases our “Same Store Sales” and increases our revenue.
This year we gave influenza vaccine to parents, caregivers, and family members of our patients.
- Our malpractice carrier gave us a letter of coverage.
- As long as we have the best interest of our patient in mind, they agreed we were covered to give the vaccine.
- We charged a flat $25 fee to all adults or people without insurance. We billed the PPO insurance for a brief visit and a flu vaccine.
- We accepted HMO reimbursements with co-pays and administration fees.
- VFC patients received the flu vaccine and we billed the administration fee.
Patients coming to our office are extremely comfortable with our staff giving injections to the children. They want to receive vaccines from our “professional” shot givers rather than going to a pharmacy or the hassle of going to their own physician. We offered one stop shopping for the entire family and, as a result, many families came in for all of their family member’s influenza vaccines. This year each patient visit resulted in multiple flu vaccinations.
This added income in our pediatric office is all margin. Providing the flu vaccine to family members adds very little to the overhead. During the 6 months of the year in which we provided the flu vaccine for our families, our office increased our “Same Store Sales”. Because we gave so many influenza vaccines, we had a very good year.
