Using technology for enhanced efficiency in community pharmacy

Finding ways to be more efficient and improve operations has always been a focus for community pharmacists struggling with fluctuating drug prices, funding cuts and difficulties securing reimbursements.

But as new opportunities to provide additional services and build more revenue streams emerge with initiatives like Pharmacy First, finding more efficient ways of working to free up time on clinical services and delivering better care become even more important.

Like most industries, technology is transforming community pharmacies, enabling businesses to remove previously laborious, manual work and instead focus more on delivering more complex, and profitable services.

In this blog we look at some of the ways technology is improving efficiencies in community pharmacies.

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

Automated dispensing systems

Automated dispensing is increasingly being used by community pharmacists to improve performance and allow pharmacists to focus more on delivering additional services.

With these systems taking over much of the heavy lifting with the counting, labelling, packaging and dispensing of medications, pharmacists have more time to spend on other services and dealing directly with patients.

Integrated clinical checks is one of the ways automatic dispensing can help pharmacy teams, removing the need to manually check records to ensure the drugs being dispensed are accurate and safe for the patient based on their prescription.

They can also help to improve efficiency by automating the reporting of prescriptions and inventory, allowing teams to quickly monitor patient outcomes, rather than spending time manually checking or following up.

By using technology to automate one of the main functions of a community pharmacy, it will provide teams with the time and resources they need to focus on other tasks and deliver additional services to patients to improve care.

Not only that, these systems can help pharmacists identify patients eligible for other services:

“There’s a big help at the moment with New Medicine Service (NMS),” says Gurminder Singh, a pharmacist featured in the first episode of our new docuseries, The Game Changers of Community Pharmacy.

“It identifies the patients who may be eligible for the service, the label automatically comes out from the dispenser, you can stick it on the bags and identify that patient when they come in and you can ask them if they’d like you to do the New Medicine Service with them and start that process.”

Enhanced pharmacy management software

A big inefficiency with “traditional” pharmacy management has been the reliance on manual processes and using multiple systems to manage and monitor separate functions like prescriptions, inventory and billing.

Intelligent pharmacy management software allows pharmacists to manage their entire business from one place, removing the need for multiple systems, and also avoiding the inefficiencies of manually transferring information from one place to another to update records.

A huge benefit from an efficiency standpoint for pharmacy management software is it can enable pharmacists to automate traditionally manual processes.

This can be particularly useful for tasks like reimbursements.

Rather than manually checking services that have been delivered and reimbursements yet to be claimed, pharmacists can simply use their management software to automatically check reimbursements against services delivered.

This not only makes the invoicing process more efficient, but ensures pharmacists are claiming the money they’re entitled to.

Electronic stock management

Stock management is a key area for improving efficiency for any community pharmacies, as poor or inefficient stock management can quickly lead to reduced revenue due to inventory loss.

Manual stock management is prone to mistakes as it can be difficult to monitor large stock levels, or notice trends in medicines that are no longer moving.

Electronically monitoring and managing stock levels takes the strain from pharmacists by providing a more accurate picture of the current stock, while providing better insights around future needs.

Intelligent stock management systems automatically monitor stock levels across the pharmacy, providing real time data in an easy to understand display so pharmacists have better oversight.

More than that though, these systems can automate much of the management by ensuring medicines are dispensed correctly to ensure stock isn’t reaching the period that becomes unusable.

Stock management systems can also automatically reorder stock based on thresholds, ensuring pharmacists don’t run the risk of under stocking popular medications, while also alleviating the problem of overstocking.

Hub and Spoke dispensing

Inventory management presents significant efficiency challenges for pharmacists, particularly from a cost efficiency perspective.

Holding excess or unsold stock ties up capital that could be used in other areas of the business like automating manual processes and robotic dispensing.

Hub and Spoke dispensing provides a huge opportunity for pharmacists by centralising routine dispensing at a central “hub” and allowing patients to pick up medications at a more convenient location.

By introducing more automation into the dispensing process, pharmacists will have more time freed up to spend on additional services and patient care.

It can also remove costs, as community pharmacies would be able to carry lower stock levels (freeing up spend for other areas) and instead serve as the “spoke” to a larger hub.

Embracing technology and change to improve efficiencies

Technology has and continues to transform pharmacy operations to make processes faster, safer and more efficient.

As community pharmacies continue to see new opportunities emerge from additional services - allowing them to build multiple revenue streams - building even more efficiencies into processes and pharmacy management is critical.

By freeing up time and budget by removing manual and laborious tasks, as well as inefficient stock management and business processes, community pharmacies will have more time to focus on patients and delivering services.

Gurminder highlights this need for extra efficiency, pointing to the fact that offering advanced services can take up a significant amount of time along with dispensing medications.

“It is a balancing act. You could have a couple of new minor ailment patients coming in, plus have some travel vaccinations, smoking cessation patients and so forth, and you day can be filled up very quickly.

“And within that and those services, imagine having to check numerous amounts of items in between [delivering all the advanced services].”

Hear more from Gurminder in his episode of Game Changers - The Visionary - and see first hand how he is driving change in an already successful family business with the introduction of new services and using technology to create more efficiency and promote services to a wider pool of patients.

Click the image below to watch the video.