How to Adapt Your Pharmacy to Market Changes and Future Challenges

Funding cuts, staff retention, rising costs and increasingly dispensing medicines at a loss due to market volatility are just some of the challenges community pharmacists have faced in the last few years.

This, alongside increasing levels of responsibility within the wider healthcare community has pushed pharmacists to think of how to adapt quickly to market conditions and embrace technology and innovation in order to tackle future challenges.

In this blog we examine how pharmacies can, and have, adapted to fast moving markets and the ways they’ve been successful.

Dealing with a changing pharmacy landscape

Changing patient needs

More than 80% of pharmacists say they’re not able to spend as much time with patients as they’d like, with 65% adding that patients have seen increased wait times for pharmacy advice.

With pharmacists now on the front line for some patient care, this time is essential for understanding needs and building relationships.

Freeing up time away from administration tasks is critical and something that new technologies can help with.

By automating processes and streamlining prescription services, pharmacists are able to spend more time on patient care, rather than filing and submitting requests.

Rising costs

Pharmacists face rising costs from staff wages, inflation and volatile prices.

However many state that pressures come from unreimbursed medicine costs and inefficiencies.

These missed costs are often a result of billing and coding errors, leading to delays or refusal to pay reimbursements. Advanced management systems for pharmacies can automate these billing processes and reduce the chances of error.

Similarly, innovative inventory management tools can help to avoid overstocking medications, freeing more revenue to invest in popular products while these systems can also highlight expensive medications to reduce buying in too costly stock.

Recruitment & staff pressures

97% of pharmacy leaders cite recruitment as one of the biggest emerging challenges they face.

Understanding the need to appeal to new recruits, using technology to streamline recruitment and providing professional development can not only help ease the pressure on pharmacy operations, but fill much needed skills gaps in these important businesses.

Building more collaborative business relationships

Community pharmacies, increasingly, are part of a much bigger care function and must be collaborative with the wider healthcare community.

A new emphasis on communication with other healthcare partners is becoming critical in order for pharmacists to provide the best patient care and stay up-to-date with local health trends that can inform their own services and business strategy.

Reducing operational costs to compete with online providers

With prescriptions going digital and mobile apps taking over much of the medicine management of patients, online pharmacies have grown in popularity for those seeking a potentially more convenient option than visiting their community pharmacy.

To combat this, community pharmacies need to embrace innovation and put technology at the centre of their offering.

This isn’t just about improving patient care and convenience.

It can also improve their own operational efficiencies and help to relieve cost pressures.

Automating and streamlining processes and reducing administrative work, can allow pharmacists to spend more time with patients, providing a better level of personal care that online only providers can’t match.

As community pharmacists become more integrated into the wider healthcare system, understanding patient needs and trends is going to be critical for staying ahead of the curve.

Michael’s Chemist is a group of two pharmacies that have proven the value of improving efficiency through technology.

They had been struggling with a paper-based system for NMS, which involved working with numerous forms, folders of notes and colour-coded post-its, which needed to be manually tracked.

This was incredibly labor intensive and resulted in missed opportunities and wasted efforts.

By adopting Pharmacy Services, they digitised the entire NMS process, greatly reducing administration by removing record duplication and providing more time for new opportunities.

Using data to make more informed decisions

Community pharmacies collect masses of useful data on operational effectiveness, revenue and profits and patient trends.

Making use of this data is essential for staying ahead of future challenges and even spotting trends before they happen.

Stock management can help to identify which products are generating profits and which are not, ensuring no more wastage on overstocking. Similarly, this information can be used to quickly identify trends in new product demands so pharmacists can quickly deploy new stock.

Avicenna Group needed a platform that would help Operations Director Sean Donoghue redirect and manage workload based on demand and product opportunity. Without data-led insights, this task would have been impossible.

By using Pharmacy Intelligence Hub with Pharmacy Manager, he was able to get real-time visibility into activities that allowed services to be efficiently distributed, ultimately resulting in a 294% increase in the service delivery.

Using a collaborative approach to understand new challenges

As we’ve mentioned, community pharmacists now operate as part of a much larger healthcare community.

This creates new opportunities for them also to understand the wider trends and challenges in the community, and which are likely to impact them or present a new opportunity.

Understanding access to local healthcare for example, could provide the potential for offering or commissioning more pharmacy services whether it’s consultations or even seasonal services like booking flu jabs.

Making the most of the insights available from others in the healthcare sector provide a greater opportunity for pharmacists to respond to new challenges and identify opportunities quicker.

Bringing technology forward to meet new challenges

Innovative community pharmacies are adapting their operations not only to better serve patients and customers, but to survive and thrive as local business in challenging times.

By leaning into new technologies and leveraging innovations like automation for administration, modernising their dispensing function and using data to create new insights and uncover opportunities, community pharmacies can become more effective as businesses and more personalised for patients and customers.

At Cegedim we understand how innovative technology can help pharmacies deal with the current and emerging challenges they face. Our Pharmacy Manager Solution can support your business with a full suite of integrated features to improve more efficient dispensing, streamlined stock and order management and remote fulfilment.

Find out how we can help your pharmacy adapt and evolve in an ever changing marketplace.