The Evolution Continues - what's next for Pharmacy Manager

Over the past 12 months we have delivered our promised monthly upgrades, providing incremental changes that are making pharmacies more efficient. This is a continual evolution, gradually improving this critical business system without rocking your world. We know you need better systems and gradual enhancement is a fundamental part of our strategy to create a system that supports the entire business of pharmacy.

Development Model

Dispensing is the heartbeat of Pharmacy Manager and we are totally committed to making dispensing processes faster, simpler and more efficient to give you more time to deliver exceptional patient care. We have listened and we know that a successful pharmacy business has many other needs too. You want better stock management, help with centralised dispensing fulfillment, more information and easier ways to prioritise workload so you can deliver enhanced customer service.

To meet these business needs we have created several teams, each with its own mission, but all working on the continuous evolution of Pharmacy Manager. For example, no pharmacy should ever be unable to dispense to a customer because it has run out of the right stock. The Stock & Order Management team is focused on helping pharmacies manage costs and maximise revenue with a fully integrated and intelligent stock and order management solution.

Our Pharmacy Intelligence and Efficiency team is helping our customers to make better use of data to make smarter decisions, creating actionable intelligence with ‘one click’ journeys to make life simpler. They are also looking at introducing more automation to remove mundane tasks that take up time. A new and dedicated Core Technology team is playing their part by focusing on the underlying platforms that will ensure we can deliver scalable and robust solutions that work the way you want to work.

12 Month Highlights

All our product development teams have worked tirelessly over the past 12 months to deliver continual enhancements – and I am super proud of their achievements and how far we’ve come. The Patient Management and Services team for example, is focused on delivering key integrations into the wider healthcare supply chain to enable you to provide better patient care. This team was responsible for the delivery of an amazing integration into the NHS – the one click access to the Summary Care Record (SCR). Providing immediate access from Pharmacy Manager to a full picture of a patient’s health and medication history via SCR was a vital addition during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, ensuring pharmacists had immediate visibility of any patients on the shielding list.

Real-Time Exemption Checking (RTEC) has also improved efficiency and enhanced infection control by minimising discussions with patients at the counter – interactions which can be hard to achieve in a safe, socially distanced manner. With RTEC a pharmacist can see immediately if a patient needs to pay for a prescription - removing the need to capture the exemption category and a signature on paper, prior to packing and posting to the BSA. With approximately half of all prescriptions processed requiring an exemption conversation, RTEC has reduced staff exposure to patient conversations, the sharing of pens and paper with limited protection between customers and staff, as well as the handling of paper tokens to send to the BSA. During the initial pilot, RTEC successfully removed almost 40% of these interactions.

Clear signposting of key pharmacy metrics with ‘one click’ user journeys is delivering tangible benefits for many pharmacies. Our data is highlighting improvement rates as high as 85% in preventing lost revenue. This is representing significant revenue improvements that can run in to tens of thousands in just one quarter. Many of you are using this new intelligence to track the number of prescriptions outstanding towards the end of the day and reallocating staff to ensure the workload is managed. We are so pleased these improved insights are helping you to change behaviour, become more efficient, productive and profitable.

So much more to come

We are so excited about the way you are using this smart technology to save money, be more efficient and deliver an amazing patient service. But we also know there is so much more we can deliver to make your lives better and more effective. We are just scratching the surface of what we can deliver on our journey to creating our powerfully simple digital PMR solution.

Our commitment to you is that we will continue to walk in your shoes and listen to your needs, we will discuss and share our ideas with visual prototypes and we relish refining them with your feedback. Our developments are in collaboration with you – we want to support pharmacy and create innovative digital solutions that drive efficiency, deliver cost savings and revenue growth and we know you value being involved in that process.

This has been an amazing journey and it’s only going to get better. Products must continually evolve to support customer needs and so we will continue to invest in all of these areas to ensure we are delivering the best solutions to delight you – and we have some very exciting plans for the next 12 months.