How profitable are English Pharmacies?

Comparing Retail Market Prices with the English Drug Tariff.

Wavedata have been collecting the prices offered to or paid by pharmacies since 2000, so we thought we’d do a comparison between the generic prices we collected in August 2022 and the English Drug Tariff.

We found that of the 3,936 products in the drug tariff, 307 had average pharmacy prices above the tariff, 2,334 had average market prices which were the same as the tariff which meant these were ZD (zero discount) products where the pharmacy broke-even and 1,295 had market prices below the tariff where pharmacies were able to make a profit.

This means that pharmacies would lose money on the 307 products unless a concession was in place (61 product price concessions were published on the 15^th and 19^th August), they would break even on the 2,334 and make a profit on the remaining 1,295.

The product with the greatest potential loss was Aripiprazole Tabs 10mg 28 which had an average market price of £20.81, an English drug tariff of £1.00 and a potential loss of £19.81 unless a concession is granted before the end of the month.

Users of Wavedata Live can run this data themselves using the analysis / open reports (option 3) to show the market prices for the drug tariff categories, combining these in a spreadsheet and then adding the drug tariff (option 6).

The most profitable products for pharmacies were Olanzapine Orodispersible Tabs 10mg 28 and 20mg 28 where the market price was just 7% of the drug tariff. This meant that for the 20mg 28 the market price was £5.43 and the tariff £79.98 and for the 10mg 28 the market price was £3.74 and the tariff £49.98.

The 20 top loss making products are:

and the 20 most profitable products are: