By Megan Moyer, senior marketing communications specialist, for the Home Health Care Opportunity blog series

In my previous post, I gave a high-level overview of the opportunity for independent pharmacies that add home health care items to their assortment. Many independent pharmacies that read it likely thought, “I don’t have room to add home health care.” I realize that many independents have limited front-end space and the thought of walkers, bath safety items, and other home health products fitting into it is hard to imagine.

The first question you should ask is where does your profitability lie in your front-end? Hopefully you have a POS system that you utilize to evaluate your inventory movement and know what categories are important to your customers and which ones aren’t shopped as often. Review those departments that aren’t as popular and determine if there is an opportunity to narrow down the items and space allocated in each and/or combine them with others. If you do that will you still meet customer expectations?

If your answers are “yes” to those two questions, the next consideration is how much space will you gain? Peter Caradonna, president, Caradonna Sales and Marketing said, “Some pharmacies have the perception that they need a full 24 feet of wall space to start a home health care department. That’s not the case. Use as much space as you have available to carry those items that will be of most use to your customer base and make it obvious that even though there are products you don’t have in the store, you can get them quickly, often the next day. You don’t have to have a hospital bed in the store when it can be ordered from your warehouse for next-day delivery.”

So, no matter what space you have to work within, by employing some ingenuity you can likely add representation of home health care to your front-end and indicate more is readily available. How can you determine whether it will be a profitable decision and how do you determine what to carry? My post next month will help you begin to figure that out.