Maintenance Dosing

Maintenance Dosing

There are a few options for maintenance:
  1. Patients can taper their dose a bit and stay with weekly injections
  2. Patients can switch to a 3-dose injection every 9/10 days
  3. Patients can switch to a 2-dose biweekly injection (every-other-week injections)
What we’ve found that works really well is every-other-week injections (the 2-dose option) - this allows for fairly easy maintenance without continual weight loss. It’s half the price for the patient, which they tend to be stoked about (less profit, but it’s better than the patient cancelling completely). 

The easiest way to order the maintenance doses is to just calculate the total mg the patient will need for that month and order the appropriate vial. For example, if your patient is on 7.5mg of Tirzepatide every other week, they’ll need 15mg total, so the closest vial is the 2mL vial of 10mg/mL (a total of 20mg) which corresponds to the 5mg dose on the chart. See the conversion chart below for more details. 

The pharmacy only recognizes the standard weekly doses (FDA-approved dosing schedule), so in order to fill an every other week dose, you’ve got to order as above (or as noted on the conversion chart). Their system can’t process the written instructions for every other week dosing. 
 
If you have the medication shipped to your office, you can just change out the paperwork with your own dosing instructions. If the vial is shipped directly to the patient, you’ll need to provide education that both the dose and instructions provided by the pharmacy are for standard dosing, not the customized dosing you're prescribing specifically for them, and that they’ll need to follow your specific instructions instead. 
 
As for pricing, you can charge half the amount, as it’s half the doses. You don’t make quite as much on maintenance packages, but it’s better than the patient stopping completely and it improves their long term results.