The pharmacy landscape has changed considerably in the last 12 months, when pharmacists were still grappling with the new contract. Services are now being confidently delivered, with many contractors actively investigating other services that can be offered profitably in the near future.
Pharmacy IT has also undergone its own transformation, assailing us with a plethora of new vocabulary to get our minds and tongues around. Words such as EPS, ETP, smartcards and N3 connections – that only recently sounded foreign and strange – have now become part and parcel of pharmacy jargon.
So much more than ETP
While the Electronic Prescription Service (EPS) has dominated pharmacy IT, the fact is that pharmacy IT is much more than ETP. All patient medication records (PMR) system suppliers will become EPS-accredited because they have to be in order to remain in business. The pharmacy contract, on the other hand, has changed the rules of the pharmacy game forever, making winners out of those pharmacists who succeed in delivering the most services, most efficiently and most profitably. So PMR systems should be compared and contrasted according to how well they enable pharmacists to achieve the provisions (and remuneration) of the new contract.
Make IT work for you
In order to make pharmacy IT work for your and your business, a PMR system needs to achieve two things. Firstly, it must automate as many time-consuming pharmacy tasks as possible to help pharmacists free up more time to deliver the new contract services that will generate more revenue for their businesses. Secondly, it needs to help pharmacists conduct and record these services as quickly and efficiently as possible. Ironically, while the traditional focus on quantitative dispensing has been superseded by qualitative delivery of value-added services, the fact remains that 99 per cent of a pharmacist’s job still comprises dispensing. However, it’s for this very reason that dispensing must become even faster than ever before to free up more time to spend with patients.
Pharmacy IT is the key to achieving this. Functionality such as scanning at the point of dispensing will help the pharmacy simultaneously to speed up the dispensing process and reduce the potential of dispensing errors. Together with EPS, scanning at the point of-dispensing should reduce dispensing to two simple keystrokes.
Work smater, not harder
By speeding up dispensing, pharmacists can concentrate on delivering new services such as medicines use reviews (MURs). MURs are probably the most highly publicised (and criticised) service outlined under the new contract, with many pharmacists experiencing significant time pressures and monotonous form-filling, both during and after the consultation process.
Pharmacists need to work smarter, not harder! By having a laptop in the consultation area, pharmacists can record the MUR as it occurs. During the MUR consultation, the software should provide full access to the patient’s PMR and steer the pharmacist through a logical stepwise progression of questions to ask the patient, allowing them to record easily the patient’s consumption habits, adverse reactions and medical conditions.
When all questions have been asked and answers recorded, the software should automatically generate the HS MUR form, complete with all the information that the pharmacist has entered into the system during the consultation, with the added ability to edit the form even at this end stage. In all, it should be possible to conduct an MUR in as little as six minutes.
Pharmacy IT needs to be flexible enough to allow pharmacists to record what they want, when they want to. So, for example, when recording interventions, pharmacists should be given the choice of manually recording the intervention after the incident has occurred or as they dispense, through automatic software prompts.
The future lies in patient loyalty
Pharmacy is set for another revolutionary change. At the same time that most pharmacists will be beginning to download electronic prescriptions from the data spine, the rollout of EPS 2 will commence. This second phase of EPS introduces the concept of patient nomination, where patients will be requested by their GP to nominate a pharmacy (or pharmacies) to which they want their electronic prescriptions to be sent. The question is – how confident are you that your patients will automatically nominate your pharmacy over your competitors? This question inevitably raises the issue of patient loyalty. As a community pharmacist, you will already have formed and maintained relationships with your customer base. However, patient nomination will test the strength of every relationship you have with every single one of your customers. By delivering services that go beyond the requirements of the new pharmacy contract, you can secure your place as the pharmacy of choice in your community. After all, evidence suggests that it is far more profitable to keep a customer than it is to find new ones.
Your PMR system should be capable of helping you increase patient loyalty in the following ways. Firstly, you should examine how you can add value easily and for as many customers as possible. It is estimated that 70 per cent of all UK prescriptions are repeats. If this is so, then the majority of your patients should be on repeat medication. If you are not already offering a prescription collection service (PCS) or domiciliary delivery service (DDS), you should think about this ahead of the EPS 2 rollout. While EPS 1 will eliminate PCS, DDS will remain important for your customers. Your PMR system should enable you to sign up patients for DDS effortlessly and help you to conduct this service as efficiently as possible.
Secondly, some PMRs now incorporate patient diagnostic software, enabling pharmacists to record diagnostic tests against patients’ individual PMRs. In this way, pharmacists can offer regular free or fee-paying health-check services, monitoring conditions such as blood pressure, cholesterol, heart conditions and obesity etc., giving patients an added level of care traditionally not provided by pharmacy.
Thirdly, technology such as SMS text messaging, email messaging and direct mail functionality that are now available in some PMR systems will help you to forge and maintain closer relationships with each if your patients at the mere touch of a button. Pharmacists can choose the level of value added services they wish to offer, from sending text messages reminding patients to collect their prescription from the pharmacy or their repeat from the GP, to targeting specific groups for special patient days e.g. asthma clinics and diabetes days, or just simply reminding customers to return to the pharmacy for their MUR. This service can even extend to helping concordance by sending reminders to prompt customers to take their medication at the correct time or, as part of a smoking cessation programme, to dispel any moments of weakness they may experience. By using these technologies, you can broaden your customer base by engaging directly with younger and harder-to-reach segments of society, such as men between the ages of 16–44 years who normally don’t avail of traditional healthcare services, and target them for regular health checks, reminders, information and advice.
Get to grips with new technology
The new contract is succeeding in highlighting and increasing the clinical role of pharmacists through the provision of and compensation for more clinically orientated healthcare services. However, in order to fulfil this clinical role, pharmacy contractors need to stay in business – and the only way to do this is to maintain profitability and a healthy bottom line. At this stage of the game, pharmacy contractors should be seeking new ways to secure their slice of the new contract remuneration. The easiest way to do this is to get to grips with new technology that will help you to deliver the most services, most efficiently and most profitably. Then simply reap the financial rewards that are available!
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