Pharmacy Show: Surviving and Thriving in a Changing Landscape

The Pharmacy Show is one of the major events in the Pharmacy calendar in October each year at the NEC Birmingham, our product team experts delivered another popular Technology Theatre session - ‘Surviving and thriving in the changing pharmacy landscape - future-proof your business with intelligent and powerfully simple technology.’

Our PMR core and Pharmacy Business Solution has evolved extensively since we re-engaged the Pharmacy Show market in 2019. We remain committed to our vision of creating the most powerfully simple digital pharmacy business solution, we are delivering regular value-added features to address the needs of the market and that's what the team demonstrated.

What did the session demonstrate? The team have focussed on some of the critical areas where pharmacies needed to drive efficiencies and easily adopt new forms of revenue. We have delivered solutions within the core PMR and suite of solutions that are helping pharmacies save time, make money and delight patients.

What makes our solutions different is the collaborative product discovery process the team have engaged our customers in, understanding your pain points through walking in your shoes, to deliver the most intelligent solutions together.

If you missed the session you can watch the full tech talk here

Helping pharmacies find efficiencies in dispensing, introducing a modularised approach.

When we talk about our approach to dispensing being a modular one, it means is looking at the key tasks that pharmacy teams need to manage when processing prescriptions and then rebuilding these key tasks as new modules. This provides the flexibility for you to re-order these tasks efficiently to fit in with the way you work, without any radical re-learning for staff.

One of our product discovery customers Amanda Smith, Pharmacist at Health Pharmacy said:

“The collaboration between the product team and the end user is a really positive one. You can feel the benefits and improvements that have been made to the system.”

Good technology should solve problems and improve the lives of our hardworking pharmacy teams. We have seen pharmacy teams print all of their prescriptions to prioritise them by hand, technology takes away this manual task through the use of intuitive filtering and workflow management tools.

The solution in our PMR (Pharmacy Manager) is the filtering tools and workflow cues that help organise these prescriptions AND an added a clinical check module that allows you to hone in on the relevant information to prioritise tasks.

We have seen pharmacies having to rely on more locums as a staffing resource which brings additional challenges. Should a temp/locum have to learn to use your whole PMR system or should they be able to just pick up the steps in a module that's relevant to their part of the process. The user interface we deliver is powerfully simple, meaning it’s intuitive and user centric

Simeon Green, Product Manager responsible for the Dispensing Stream at Cegedim says that, 

“It is automation that is going to drive the change needed in this industry. Should a pharmacist have to clinically check a prescription month on month where there's been no changes? Absolutely not! It’s digital processes – smart technology that removes these manual processes to free up your staff time so that they can engage in patient-facing services. Afterall, it’s these services that are critical to Population Health, and in today's climate they’re essential to tap into those additional revenue streams.”

Watch Simeon's full dispensing overview in the tech talk video for more details

Ensuring pharmacies can deliver clinical services intuitively from within their PMR

Luke Bolton, Product Manager for the Clinical Services workstream demonstrates how the Pharmacy Services platform addresses this critical business area. Clinical services have grown in importance in recent years, with the NHS asking pharmacies to do much more with much less. Squeezed core dispensing revenues mean it's going to become more and more important to find more diverse income streams to make money in pharmacy.

We have seen and understood the apprehensiveness to fully embrace Clinical Services as it is often delivered through clunky technology that's got little or no integration and that's why we developed an integrated, new modern web-based Pharmacy Services platform.

Our Pharmacy Services platform was, launched, initially to tackle CPCS, making sure pharmacies don't miss out on referrals that come in from the NHS services such as NHS111. Referral alerts can now be seen front and centre within the Pharmacy Manager PMR, making it almost impossible for our customers to miss a referral.

Another key product discovery customer, Superintendent Pharmacist Richard Hackett, Weldricks Pharmacy said:

“Our teams were able to respond to patients much quicker. As soon as we got a referral from the NHS we were able to deal with it, it pops up on the system to tell us there is a referral and we can deal with it in a much more timely manner, which improves customer service and also means it is easier for our team.”

Luke Bolton, Product Manager explains; “As general IT consumers we are accustomed to and come to expect intuitive connected user journeys, but I think it's safe to say that in Pharmacy that's not always been the case and the whole industry has had to put up with a lot of substandard tech over the years. We wanted Pharmacy Services to be different and we wanted it to work how you work because it’s a business-critical tool and it should be working with you not against you.”

Watch the full clinical services section in the tech talk for more details

Real-time data insights to stores through an Intelligence Hub

One of the early product discovery observations was the lack of joined up systems making it difficult to keep track on what is actually happening in the pharmacy or across your pharmacy network. Many of the conversations we had, highlighted you had very little confidence that key pharmacy tasks were happening reliably - everyday in your stores.

 And so that’s why we created the Pharmacy Intelligence Hub, a digital connection to your stores which surfaces the metrics you need in the way you need them SO THAT you can manage your stores effectively.

Tracey Robertson, Product and Technical Director describes the intelligence hub as,  “Giving you a digital heartbeat, so you're always connected to your stores! Helping you drive efficiency and profitability throughout your business.”

Sean Clarke from McKeevers Chemists is a product discovery partner who has been using the Intelligence Hub for 6 months now, says: “We can now see how our shops are performing and that allows us to manage our financial performance in a completely new way. Before we had no real way of telling how many scripts had expired or what we hadn’t claimed for, this visibility alone helps us run our stores more efficiently and profitably.”

In the product talk, Tracey goes on to highlight why: " To provide the right level of foresight comes the need to drive more predictive metrics, this is super important when you're looking at some of the complicated services that are on the more challenging payment frameworks. We wanted to take the guesswork out of setting targets and by intelligently monitoring activity across the stores, we can tell you where you need to focus attention to ensure you deliver maximum revenue opportunities within your stores.”

Watch the Pharmacy Intelligence Hub section for more details

Manage remote dispensing and fulfilment through Hub Fulfilment Manager

Pharmacies are exploring other ways to free up time in stores and some are looking at hub and spoke as an opportunity for more capacity and efficiency. During our product discovery process, we saw pharmacies were benefiting from Hub and Spoke, however what was highlighted was that it wasn't perfect and there was room for improvement.

We looked at end-to-end prescription visibility within the Hub and Spoke journey between the store and the Hub and provided a real-time status update so all staff and the patient know exactly when their prescription will be available for collection.

Product discovery highlighted that Pharmacists need the tools in store to maintain clinical responsibility for the patient. Here we have leveraged our clinical check module to not only give staff in the store the ability to control the prescription directions, but also use the real-time decision support within that module to flag up any warnings they need to be concerned about before that prescription arrives at the Hub. Once it arrives at the Hub it is locked down and the staff are unable to change it.

Andrew Gent, Product Manager covering the Hub Fulfilment stream of development describes a final opportunity to maximise the efficiency of hub and spoke; 

“We needed to ensure the dispatch and delivery of prescriptions was also as efficient as possible. We introduced a scan-driven Tote Management Module, using a single barcode at both the store and the hub to allow staff to dispatch and receive multiple prescriptions in one quick scan. That ensures not only accuracy within the supply chain but also maximises the efficiency of that process.”

Andy covers more detail in the full tech talk video here 

This is just the start, find out more

So, the team have shared just some of the ways that technology is being leveraged to play a key role in automating processes to drive efficiency and how innovation is enabling new levels of business visibility and understanding, ultimately improving patient experience and outcomes.

But this is just the start, we have delivered other digital innovations that we know pharmacies desperately need and we will continue to share these through our product updates.

Interested in better pharmacy business solutions? If you are using another PMR but considering switching, our friendly pharmacy solutions experts offer product demonstrations and can help you assess what ROI a new solution can bring to your pharmacy.

Keep up to date with latest software developments and insights for your pharmacy.

Existing Pharmacy Manager customers can sign up to receive updates and release guides directly.