Vaccine Business Viability Analysis

TL;DR: It's easier to calculate your vaccine profitability (if it exists!) now.  See below.

I've written a lot about the business of vaccines over the years and, according to my archives, have presented on the topic at least 30 times at events like the AAP NCE, PMI, PCC's Users' Conference, and plenty of chapter meetings.  I have a handful of blog entries with various spreadsheet-based immunization administration analysis tools and/or benchmarks on vaccine profitability.  I've made some insanely complicated analytical tools (shout out to Susanne for the tool we built 20y ago that no one has ever seen), I've looked at 100s of millions of dollars of vaccine payment data, and at the end of the day, I've learned that most people just "want the answer."  Are vaccines profitable enough that they can go back to seeing patients and know they aren't being ripped off?

First, immerse yourself in this brief position paper from the AAP: Ensuring Practice Sustainability for Pediatric Immunization Infrastructure.  It's the AAP's work to dig into the real costs to pediatricians when immunizing children.  Here's the new punchline: "...when operational expenses are included, the total cost of maintaining an immunization program may reach up to 30% above the vaccine acquisition price."  We're no longer talking about 17-28%.  [Intrepid readers may note the comment estimating the value of vaccines in the fridge.]

To help you see where you land, I've created a new tool from an amalgam of tools I've released before.  Usually, I build a spreadsheet, and people have to download it, edit it, etc., and I know that too many people bail out before they complete the work.  It will be hard to make it much easier than this tool below.

The instructions are simple. 

• Download the tool.  It will save as an .html file.  You can double-click on it and it should open in a browser for you to use any time.
• Run a report in your PM/EHR and count up all the vaccines and admins you did for a good chunk of time - I like a year.
• Calculate the average payment for each.  Enter the data into the tool by hand or drop a spreadsheet into it!
• Grab your vaccine purchase invoices and enter that information for each vaccine.
• Adjust the expected cost estimates in the upper left corner to determine whether you are losing or making money.  Look at the "Total Margin" result in the Margin Comparison box.  This is where the "...up to 30%" language comes into play.  By default, the tool chooses 25%.
• If you are speaking to one of the third parties trying to buy your vaccine business, enter their proposed payments for each admin and/or vaccine into "Prop Pay" field at the end.  You can quickly learn, as many do, that their math and the real math are often not the same. 
• If you get lost, check the Instructions tab inside the tool itself. 
• You can then SAVE your work by exporting it all to a CSV to analyze later.

Please give it a whirl and let me know if you have any trouble!  Here's a screenshot below of the tool in action.

Share your results with me!