Meet one of our Senior Product Leads, Andy Gent. Tasked with overcoming the challenges pharmacy faced with “Remote, Automated Dispensing & Fulfilment” Andy has led the design and development of Cegedim’s second-generation Hub and Spoke solution – Hub Fulfilment Manager.
As detailed recently by my colleague Simeon Green, we follow a “Listen, Act, Improve” mantra at Cegedim. A fundamental part of this involves ‘walking in our customers’ shoes’ and witnessing them during their daily working lives to gain a better understanding of their pain points and problems. Only by doing this can we truly understand what issues we need to resolve and design an intuitive and a truly digital solution.
Working with a number of key customers and influential pharmacy groups, we spent several months gaining a better understanding of how customers currently operate Hub & Spoke. This was with the goal of identifying areas where we can innovate and improve.
The issues raised during this discovery could be categorised into one of the following areas:
1. Head Office Compliance & Control
2. Prescription Visibility
3. Nomination & Claiming
4. Clinical Responsibility
5. Smart Automation
These were areas that had been identified as critical pain points causing daily challenges to pharmacies operating a Hub & Spoke operation. Let’s take a look at a couple of these in more detail and discuss how we’ve looked at addressing these within Hub Fulfilment Manager.
With so much information now available at our finger tips, we’re a society that demands frequent updates – for example, when was the last time you purchased something online and weren’t provided order updates as it progressed?
This is something we saw countless pharmacies struggle with during Hub & Spoke discovery. Often, once a prescription was sent to the Hub for assembly, pharmacies lost all visibility and struggled to answer basic questions from patients about when their prescription was going to be ready for collection. With the emergence of more online pharmacies, things like this could be the difference between a patient staying and them moving to another pharmacy.
Hub Fulfilment Manager provides a real-time prescription status, shared at all times between the Hub and the local pharmacy (Spoke). This ensures that all staff across the supply chain are able to quickly and easily identify the progress of a patient’s prescription.
A common challenge for contractors looking to start Hub & Spoke dispensing is putting the correct tools and processes in place to allow pharmacists to easily maintain clinical control of the prescription, whilst providing them with the confidence that the prescription will be assembled according to their instruction.
During discovery, we identified workarounds being used which forced pharmacies to fully dispense a prescription locally, just so that a Clinical Check could be performed ahead of it being sent to the Hub. The pharmacies simply did not have the correct tools to allow them to separate out key parts of dispensing process for Hub & Spoke prescriptions, leading to inefficiencies in the workflow. This is ironic, considering a key driver for implementing Hub & Spoke is to free up staff time in the store.
Taking a step back, we analysed this against the existing Pharmacy Manager dispensing workflow and identified the need for a more flexible approach to Clinical Checks, allowing pharmacists to maintain control of prescription directions and review decision support warnings e.g. interaction checks, WITHOUT the need to fully dispense a prescription.
In response we decided to build a brand new, intuitive Clinical Check module allowing staff to isolate a key part of the dispensing process, providing them with them with an efficient, flexible and most importantly, clinically safe solution for checking prescriptions.
This has played an important part in our wider Pharmacy Manager strategy, providing customers with a flexible and Modular approach to dispensing. Simeon Green, Product Manager for our Dispensing Services team talks about this in more detail – click here to learn more.
Historically, Hub & Spoke dispensing has been restricted to pharmacies who operate under the same legal entity. This means it was usually adopted by larger pharmacy groups, corporates or independent multiples.
However, changes are imminent. These policy changes will likely level the playing field, providing smaller contractors with the ability to access third-party dispensing Hubs. Over time, this should allow all pharmacies to reduce the time spent on dispensing, freeing up critical pharmacy time to focus on other valuable tasks e.g. delivering patient facing services.
Thankfully, early insight has allowed us to develop Hub Fulfilment Manager with legislation change in mind. This therefore means we’re well placed to help support your Hub & Spoke journey, regardless of whether you’re planning to operate your own Hub or not.
We’re super proud of what we’ve achieved with our second-generation Hub & Spoke solution – Hub Fulfilment Manager. It’s a solution packed full of intuitive, value-adding features which have been designed in collaboration with real-life pharmacy teams to ensure that it helps rather than hinders staff during their busy pharmacy workdays. As with all of our Products, Hub Fulfilment Manager will continue to evolve, ensuring that it stays ahead of the curve and delivers regular enhancements to support pharmacies as they grow.
For more information, take a look at our website or get in touch to learn more.