As the role of pharmacies evolves further away from purely dispensing medication into a more central part of clinical and community healthcare, the opportunities to expand services and take advantage of new revenue streams have grown significantly.
With financial strains growing due to unpredictable supply and prices of medications, plus difficulties with reimbursements for services, pharmacies are continually looking for ways to drive profits.
These opportunities don’t come without some challenges however. Especially when looking at how community pharmacies integrate effectively with the wider healthcare community, and how they can improve operations and shift away from predominantly manual processes into an effective and automated model.
In this blog we take a closer look at the Digital Evolution of Pharmacies and the technologies that have had the biggest impact.
Before you get into the blog, watch episode one of our new docuseries "The Game Changers of Community Pharmacy" by clicking the image below
Pharmacists play a much bigger role in general healthcare, with GP and other NHS services stretched to the limit, pharmacists have been asked to step in to provide more clinical based services, preventative consultations and even management of long-term illnesses.
Pharmacists now have much better access to patient data, with information more readily available between partners, meaning pharmacists can contribute to patient health records, which are immediately synced to records available to other health providers.
This has enabled pharmacists to collaborate better with other services and provide consultative services that would otherwise have required GP intervention first.
The biggest benefit of this has been that patients can seek and retrieve treatment quicker for minor ailments because they no longer require a GP appointment - which according to the NHS can take around around 19 days to be seen.
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Streamlining Prescriptions with Electronic Services
While additional services are available, prescriptions remain the ‘bread and butter’ service of community pharmacists.
Traditionally these services have been highly inefficient because they relied on manual processes and patients requiring a repeat prescription from a GP.
Many of these barriers have now been removed by making the service “digital”.
Patients no longer need a GP appointment for a repeat prescription as they’re automatically sent to their preferred pharmacy for pick up, with notifications handled electronically. Electronic prescriptions also improve systems for pharmacists as they no longer need to manually sort prescriptions for dispensing.
The process has also made reimbursement easier for pharmacists and services are more accurately (and automatically) recorded so pharmacists have a more accurate record of what they’ve provided.
In our new docuseries, The Game Changers of Community Pharmacy we spoke to Gurminder Singh, a second generation pharmacist who has transformed his family’s already successful community pharmacy business through the introduction of technology and advanced services.
He highlighted how developments like the New Medicine Service (NMS) was proving invaluable for identifying patients eligible for services.
Gurminder said:
“There’s a big help at the moment with NMS in that it identifies the patients who may be eligible for the service, then it can be targeted at those patients, because the label automatically comes out from the dispenser, then you can stick it on the bags and identify that patient when they come in and ask them if they’d like us to do the New Medicine Service with them and start that process.”
Transforming from prescriptive to predictive with Big Data
Community pharmacies have always accumulated masses of data on everything from business operations, medications and patient care.
However, until now this data hasn’t been easily accessible as it was largely collected manually on paper forms, nor has it been particularly useful as it has been difficult to analyse large data sets from different sources.
Today, big data and analytics platforms in Pharmacy Management software enables pharmacists to easily access the entire picture of their operations and services.
Whether it’s accessing more accurate patient records, automatically monitoring inventory levels or even identifying inefficiencies within processes, pharmacists can dig into the detail of their business far more effectively than they previously could.
More than that though, data can now be used as a predictive tool, allowing pharmacists to make more accurate decisions about what to do in the future or identifying what could happen, based on historical data and trends.
Whether it’s resource management, identifying when particular services prove more popular to inform marketing efforts, or using automated stock checking to deal with the resupplying of medication to avoid over or understocking, data can play a much bigger role in improving pharmacy services in the future.
Transforming dispensing with robotics
Robotic dispensing has revolutionised medication management and efficiency within pharmacies. By taking manual processes out of dispensing, it’s not only made the process faster and more efficient, but safer.
A key benefit of robotic dispensing is the improved accuracy of dispensing, removing the chance of human error and ensuring patients get the right medication.
As well as the safety aspect of improved accuracy, robotic dispensing also improves accuracy in inventory management, as stock levels can be automatically monitored and reordered if they fall below a certain threshold.
This not only ensures popular (and profitable) medications remain stocked, but also reduces waste by ensuring large stocks of medications don’t pass their point of use because they’ve mistakenly reordered.
Robotic dispensing is an essential part in allowing pharmacists to take advantage of new opportunities like expanded services, by giving them more time back in order to promote and fulfil these services.
By removing manual and laborious parts of the dispensing process, pharmacists can spend more time with patients, improving care and building relationships, and focussing on revenue generating tasks rather than admin.
This is another point Gurminder touched on in his Game Changers episode, stating that robotic dispensing was allowing pharmacists to focus on more challenging aspects of the job, like working the counter and interacting with patients.
He added:
“Robotic dispensing is something that has changed pharmacies. Now those physical and clinical aspects of pharmacists thinking and gauging how a patient is feeling [is becoming more important].
“The counter is the hardest thing to learn in pharmacy because you’re thinking on your feet, almost semi diagnosing a patient as they’re talking and getting in the questions that we need to ask - the WWHAM questions - that’s the hardest part.
“It’s almost working on getting back the confidence of putting yourself back into being a new counter assistant in the pharmacy [and dealing with patients face-to-face in a consultative role].
Unlocking new pharmacy opportunities with digital marketing
It’s not just within pharmacy and patient management that technology has had a huge impact on community pharmacists.
Digital marketing techniques have allowed pharmacists to promote services to a much wider audience, relieving some of the stresses of relying purely on footfall to generate interest.
Search engine optimisation, content marketing, pay-per-click advertising and social media all enable pharmacists to create educational content and capture attention based on patient searches around services and treatments.
As pharmacists continue to expand the services they offer, it opens even more potential to target online searches for stop smoking services and treatments for other ailments that pharmacists can now treat within GP involvement.
Instore options like Digital Displays offer another avenue for increasing revenue.
By creating engaging instore content on displays around the store, pharmacists can advertise new services directly to patients.
Whether it’s drawing attention to promotional offers or advising about seasonal treatments like flu jabs and vaccines, Digital Displays are a vital part of new marketing techniques available to pharmacists.
Marketing pharmacy services is something Gurminder says has dramatically changed during his time in the family business:
“Before, it was very ‘give a leaflet out to your customer base’, but now we’re looking to court people from different areas. Everything’s going a lot more digital now, so you almost have to be a digital marketing expert.
“You have to know about websites, and learn about search engine optimisation, pay per click on Google, you have to know how to start doing social media and trying to be a bit different as a pharmacy.”
Technology is paving the way for better pharmacy management patient care
Technology continues to play an important and ever growing role in community pharmacies.
Whether it’s improving productivity, improving accuracy and safety in medication dispensing, or using technology to promote additional services and offers to patients, pharmacy technology sits at the centre of most modern pharmacy operations.
At Cegedim we’ve worked with hundreds of pharmacies to adapt and evolve to the new challenges they face and make the most of the new revenue opportunities they now have.
Today’s pharmacies need a new vision for how they’ll operate in order to keep up with industry changes and expectations on the role of community pharmacies in healthcare.
Gurminder added community pharmacists faced a significant challenge keeping up with changes, but must put exceptional patient care at the centre of any decision about change.
“It’s just predicting the movement of things, and everything can change. So [it’s about pharmacists] being flexible and as a baseline keeping true to your clinical knowledge, true to your overall ethics or practice and trying to do everything to the best of your standard.”
Watch the full episode of Game Changers: The Visionary and hear more from Gurminder and his family about how they’ve dealt with the challenges and taken advantage of the opportunities presented by the digital evolution of community pharmacists.
Click the image below to watch the video.