We’ve been working hard over the last few years to focus on the simple mantra of saving pharmacies time and making them money. It’s not rocket science; until hard-pressed clinicians and pharmacy staff get the time to maximise the opportunity that Pharmacy First and other services give them, they will forever be stuck on the increasingly unprofitable hamster wheel of labelling boxes.
How do we do that? Through driving automation of tasks and delivering new workflow efficiencies. We can evidence that, through innovations we have made, we can free up, for a typical pharmacy, a third of their time per week. Many have demonstrated this by believing we are being too conservative with our numbers, but the reality is much more.
Recent Analyst PMR innovations include:
- Script Queue Filters: No longer overwhelmed by a huge list of work to be done, Analyst users can click a button to filter down to just the scripts they want to focus on.
- Enhanced Clinical Review: Don’t let anyone tell you it is A.I. (because it isn’t!). But powerful algorithms turn the historically throw-away repeat task of a clinical check into a stored and thereafter automated process, massively freeing up the clinician’s time. Those concerned about clinical safety can be assured that, because we do it at the patient level, not the drug level, it is much safer than systems taking a drug approach. Clinicians personalise the full rule set, so they are always in total control too.
- Assisted Dispensing: It’s great to see pharmacists’ jaws drop when they see this feature for the first time. One click of a button and reams of labels automatically print off, with no more hours spent bashing away at a keyboard. One pharmacist described it as “a complete game changer”, and it’s really making a huge difference for many of our customers.
We’ve pioneered mobile scanning technology in pharmacy for years now, and most of our customers use either our Quickpick batch picking app or Handout, our shelf management and retrieval app, or, increasingly, both. Handout now also features customer collection codes and automated, tailored patient messaging, significantly cutting down on calls into the pharmacy and massively improving the patient experience. There are two reasons why we are so committed to mobile scanning: accuracy and speed. It’s why every other industry that features automated workflows, from Amazon to your local supermarket, does the same.
Analyst PMR users have all this technology available right now, and they can be confident that we, as their technology partner, can offer everything they need to be successful in this rapidly changing industry.
Services
Having saved all this time within the dispensing workflow, we’ve also got the technology to really make the most of the time we now have free to deliver services and drive new revenue streams.
Our mobile, cloud-based services platform, HxConsult, is integrated into Analyst PMR and offers a significantly richer, more powerful user experience than legacy products out there. As one of the selected partners chosen by the NHS to pioneer Pharmacy First, we have been involved in building the technology to support NHS services early (and let’s be clear, Pharmacy First is only the start of the recovery plan), working so closely with NHS, puts us exactly where we want to be – true vanguards at the cutting edge of pharmacy services technology.
You can process a range of services using HxConsult including Pharmacy First, NMS, Blood Pressure Checking, Contraception, Private MultiVac with DMS and Smoking Cessation due very soon. When combined with our patient app, MyHealthHub, we can offer a fully digital, integrated solution handling patient bookings through to delivering the consultations (remotely or face-to-face). Promote your services, manage your bookings, and give patients the ability to order their repeat prescriptions in the palm of their hand.
Opportunities
By supporting our pharmacy customers in getting their teams working to the limits of their licences, the opportunity to generate exciting, new income streams will not be wedded to the fickleness of drug tariffs. The opportunity is here to redefine the importance of community pharmacy to patients, government, and the NHS.
All of this is possible, but only if you are prepared to lean into the technology to help you achieve it. We’ve moved from being ‘just’ a PMR provider to being much more of a strategic, technology expert for our customers because PMR cannot sit in isolation. It needs to be part of a much bigger, technology ecosystem that is as agile and adaptable as the market is challenging and changing.
If your PMR partner isn’t offering you all this, then challenge them as to why? Don’t choose a provider because their product looks shiny, they’re the cheapest or they’re good at the spin, look for a provider of substance who can return much more than the cost of their system both now, and for the future.
It's exciting times at Positive Solutions and we are not resting on our laurels, with an exciting roadmap ahead for the rest of 2024, we’re keeping our foot to the floor and driving more innovation, more ways to save time and make money.
Discover how our technology can save you time and increase profits. Learn more about Analyst PMR here.
