Streamlining pharmacy workflows

Community pharmacies continue to shift from their traditional role of dispensers towards a more integrated part of community healthcare.

Able to offer more clinically focussed and personalised services historically requiring GP intervention, pharmacists face ample opportunity to not only offer more comprehensive and personalised care packages, but also take advantage of new revenue streams.

The challenge is creating the environment for better and more personalised services within historically manual and laborious processes that are neither time or cost effective.

A key way community pharmacists can take advantage of new opportunities is by using new technology to streamline pharmacy workflows and reduce many of the manual tasks they’ve traditionally dealt with.

Technology is helping pharmacists create more consistency and efficiency in processes, use data to analyse workflows and remove bottlenecks and reduce errors in dispensing.

In this blog we’ll look at how streamlining pharmacy workflows can improve pharmacy operations while creating an environment for better patient care.

Before you get into the blog, watch episode one of our new docuseries "The Game Changers of Community Pharmacy" by clicking the image below

Creating more consistency and efficiency

One of the main advantages of streamlining pharmacy workflows through technology and automation is the significant efficiency improvements it can drive. 

By streamlining tasks like prescription filling, labelling and packaging pharmacists reduce the time needed to dispense medication so they can spend more time with patients.

Streamlining workflows and using technology also leads to more accuracy and reduces the risks of medication errors - which is one of the biggest patient risks with manual checks.

Automated pharmacy management systems use innovative technology like barcode scanning and robotic dispensing systems to improve accuracy both in labelling and dispensing, ensuring patients get the right medication and removing the risk of errors.

This can also help to reduce costs due to wastage, caused by improper dispensing and counting.

Identifying and removing bottlenecks

Pharmacy workflow automation can help to streamline processes by helping pharmacists identify and tackle inefficiencies and bottlenecks within their current systems.

These challenges are often rooted in a lack of overall visibility and transparency that make it harder to manage stock and inventory, track orders or manage overall performance.

For example, because many pharmacies rely on manual processes, it could result in some work being duplicated, slowing the process down.

Automating services can help root out these redundant processes so pharmacists can continually improve how they work.

One key area this can help is with inventory management. 

Manual checks can be time consuming and are prone to inaccurate counting. 

Pharmacy management technology can automate this process, optimising stock levels and automating reordering based on demand.

Improving collaboration

As pharmacies play a bigger role in the wider community healthcare system, the need for better collaboration between partners and systems grows to ensure accuracy and better patient care.

This presents a significant challenge for “traditional” pharmacy practices, which have required manual updates and duplication of data.

Simply from a safety perspective, this is highly risky, as manually transposing data from one source to another can lead to inaccuracies and incorrect patient information being held across different sources.

This could easily translate into pharmacists dispensing incorrect medication, or medication that could interact with current prescriptions and cause problems for a patient.

Pharmacy management technology removes these risks by automatically syncing data between providers (for example between the pharmacy and a GP) to ensure the correct information is shared and accurately recorded.

Removing errors and improving inventory management

Any manual workflow is potentially more prone to errors than automating through technology. The problem in a pharmacy setting is that these errors can have potentially catastrophic consequences for patients.

A wrong number copied into a note, a misplaced decimal point or even misread handwriting can lead to inaccurate dispensing of medication to patients.

From an operational perspective, the consequences are also significant. For example, manual inventory management can result in inaccurate counts are missed labels, meaning stock passes the point it can be dispensed and must be disposed of, resulting in losses.

It can also lead to unneeded reordering of certain medications, increasing losses from wastage.

Automating these processes removes the risks of errors from manual entry and automatically copying the correct information, while stock can be intelligently managed, with reorders based on accurate stock levels.

Using data to drive decision making

Another big issue with manual processes is that it’s hard to get an accurate overview of what is really happening when data is stored in disparate locations, or simply written on notes.

Automated workflows not only generate data that can be managed from one system, but allow that data to be analysed so it can be used to make more accurate decisions, essentially taking pharmacists away from using data to see what’s already happened, and allowing them to predict what’s going to happen based on trends.

This can help with everything from stock and inventory management (recording stock levels and reordering automatically based upon set thresholds) and streamlining and improving processes by identifying and removing redundancies.

By using data to understand what is happening, pharmacists can reduce the time they take on manual processes and tasks and put more of their time into patient care.

How RD Hill Chemist benefitted from streamlined processes

When RD Hill Chemist’s introduced New Medicine Service into their offering, they needed a system to efficiently manage clinical records and consultations, while also ensuring they saw the commercial benefits of the new service.

The team worked with Cegedim to implement processes for identifying and enrolling patients, using automated prompts to alert of any patients starting on new medicines so pharmacists received timely alerts and could make the necessary prescription notes.

By integrating their processes, RD Hill Chemist was able to streamline their NHS service, resulting in a 176 services delivering - exceeding the NHS target by more than 70%

You can read more about their success here. 

Increasing efficiency and patient care with Cegedim

Community pharmacies must adapt in order to take advantage of new opportunities and revenue potential available through additional services.

By streamlining processes and removing manual tasks as much as possible they can free up the time to provide a more personalised and comprehensive service to patients that’s more efficient, effective and safe.

Of course we understand that change like this isn’t always easy, both from a practical sense but also when it comes to getting buy-in from teams and staff.

That’s why we’re here to support you with everything from adoption to engagement to ensure you not only get the best technology and support systems, but also get the best results.

Click the image below to watch the video.