Medical Services

     

     We all need to know about the Pharmaceutical Distribution Trends. For drug manufacturers, pharmaceutical distributors are the important link between products and the pharmacies, health care providers and patients who need them. Culled from the HDA Factbook: The Facts, Figures and Trends in Healthcare (2017–2018) are 10 distribution trends and benchmarks that manufacturers should know as they craft their future growth and expansion plans.Despite the increase in pharmaceutical sales to customers through distributors, the average number of manufacturers that each distributor handles is dropping. In 2016, the average number of manufacturers from which one distributor purchased goods and services from was 1,211. That’s down from 1,216 in 2015 and 1,474 in 2014.Of all pharmaceutical sales that distributors handled in 2016, 98 percent were for prescription drugs, with the remaining 2 percent representing non-prescription drugs, health and personal care items, durable medical equipment (DME), home health products and general merchandise. That’s roughly the same sales ratio as the previous year. But, the percentage of sales represented by brand-name non-specialty drugs slipped to 65.9 percent in 2016 from 67 percent in 2015, while the percentage of sales represented by brand-name specialty drugs rose to 18 percent from 16.1 percent over the same period.