RCPA in Pharma: How to Actually Do It, and What the Numbers Mean

Almost everything written about RCPA explains what the letters stand for and stops. Retail Chemist Prescription Audit. Fine. Nobody explains what you actually say when you are standing at the counter and the chemist is busy, or what you do with the numbers afterwards.

I did these for fifteen years. Here is the operational version.

What you are really measuring

RCPA answers one question that no other activity answers: are the prescriptions actually being written, and for whose product?

Your doctor says he is prescribing your brand. Your secondary sales say something else. RCPA is the only way to find out which of those is true, because the chemist sees the prescription after the doctor has forgotten the conversation with you.

Three things come out of a good audit:

• Volume — how many prescriptions in the molecule, per week or month
• Share — how many of those are yours versus each competitor
• Source — which doctors are actually writing them

The third is the one most reps skip and the one that changes your week.

Timing and approach

Go when the shop is empty. Mid-morning on a weekday, not lunchtime, not evening. A chemist who is serving customers will give you numbers to make you leave, and those numbers are worthless.

Do not open with a form. Nothing closes a conversation faster than a clipboard. Buy something, or at least stand on the customer side of the counter for a minute first.

Be honest about what you want. Chemists know exactly what you are doing. Pretending otherwise insults them. "Can I ask what is moving in the cardio range this month?" works far better than a script.

The three questions that work

1. "What is moving in [molecule] this month?" — open, no brand named, no pressure. You will learn the market before you learn your share.
2. "Roughly how many of those are [your brand]?" — a proportion is enough. Do not push for exact counts; you will get a guess presented as a fact.
3. "Anyone writing it regularly?" — this is the question that pays. If the chemist names two doctors, you have just learned more than a month of calls would have told you.

If you get an answer to all three, thank them and go. Reps lose chemists by staying too long.

The sheet, field by field

Copy-paste sheet

CHEMIST:                          DATE:

LOCATION / NEAR WHICH CLINIC:

MOLECULE / THERAPY AREA:

PERIOD AUDITED:  week / month

TOTAL SCRIPTS IN MOLECULE:

  OUR BRAND:                      approx share:

  COMPETITOR 1:                   count:

  COMPETITOR 2:                   count:

  COMPETITOR 3:                   count:

DOCTORS NAMED AS PRESCRIBING:

STOCK ON SHELF:    yes / no / low

SUBSTITUTION SEEN: yes / no    to what:

CHEMIST COMMENT:

ACTION:

FOLLOW-UP DATE:

A filled example

Chemist: Aptieka near Gailezers · Date: 14 May · Molecule: ACE inhibitors

Total scripts, last month: roughly 40. Ours: about 6. Competitor A: about 20. Competitor B: about 12.

Doctors named: Dr. Ozola writes ours regularly. Dr. Berzins writes Competitor A almost exclusively.

Stock: low, two packs left. Substitution: yes — when ours is out, they give Competitor A.

Comment: "Your rep before you never checked stock, so we stopped ordering much."

Action: raise the stock issue with the stockist this week; Dr. Berzins is the target, not Dr. Ozola. Follow-up: 12 June.

Read what that sheet actually tells you. Your share is 15%. You have one loyal prescriber and one you have never converted. And you are losing sales at the counter because you are out of stock — which is not a Detailing problem and no amount of doctor calls will fix it.

That is a month of direction from a ten-minute conversation.

The point of turning the audit into a target list is what happens at the counter afterwards: a booked order against a real shelf. That is the whole subject of POB in pharma.

How fake RCPA gets caught, and why it is not worth it

Managers know. The tells are boring and obvious:

• Numbers that are suspiciously round, month after month
• Your share always slightly up, never down
• Total market volume that never moves
• Chemist comments that sound like a rep wrote them
• Audits filed on days the shop was closed

And the real cost is not getting caught. It is that you have destroyed the one instrument that tells you the truth about your territory. A rep with honest RCPA knows where the business is. A rep with invented RCPA is guessing and does not know they are guessing.

If you did not do the audit, write that you did not do it.

Capturing it without paperwork

The bottleneck is the same as with call reports: you have a good conversation at the counter and by the time you write it up you have lost the doctor names and the chemist's exact words.

RepFlow handles that side — you talk for thirty seconds after leaving the shop and it comes back as a structured record you can search later, in whatever language you speak, working offline. Free to try, no card.

But the sheet above works in a notebook. The reason most RCPA is worthless is not the format. It is that it was filled in from memory, or not at all — the same decay that wrecks a daily call report written on a Friday night, and the reason the honest case for automating call reports is to capture at the moment, in whatever form is fast enough that you actually do it.