Time - Pharmacy’s most valuable commodity?

The Value of Time

Time is a tricky one, there’s a lot of it but in the pharmacy industry, like many others, there just isn’t enough time to go around to all the areas needing it. Speaking to various Pharmacy groups in the UK in the past few months, Time has been a recurring theme. The data is all there, but the time required to find and collate it all is just too much. As one independent group owner put it ‘‘Pharmacy is data-rich but time-poor!’’

So, we felt it would be useful to give some ideas as to how data analytics and business intelligence (BI) can save owners, managers, directors, and pharmacists plenty of time and help them use it to garner more productivity on all levels of the business.

"RWA has brought all the key aspects of performance management and PQS together and forms an integral part of the journey of getting a little bit of life back. It saves a huge amount of time on tracking various aspects. Excellent time saving back-office tool."

- Amarjit Tanday, Owner of Opal Pharmacy Group.

How much time do you or your staff spend sifting through data and looking for answers? What other tasks could they do with that time if this was looked after already? For this article, I’m going to zero in on our Services module, particularly New Medicine Service (NMS), and how it will save you and your staff time and ultimately generate revenue.

Dispensing margins are shrinking every year, NHS funding is moving toward a more service-led model and it’s increasingly difficult to increase patient numbers. As a result, it’s crucial to maximise profits from each patient – your NMS can be a great way to go.

There are of course many things inhibiting your NMS performance, such as:

1. Staff being too busy at peak hours, or the branch is simply understaffed.
2. It can be difficult to manage all the stages of an NMS, we see a lot of pharmacies with huge amounts of NMS engagements but it’s a real struggle completing them.
3. Without insights from your data, it can be impossible to identify where opportunities are being missed and where improved performance would yield additional profits.

I have seen pharmacies using old-school paper and folders with their month-end PMR reports and NHS data trends and even hiring additional staff or locums to try and get on top of their NMS performance. These methods are neither efficient nor cheap, but it is also hugely time-consuming. That is where a data analytics BI solution comes in, and some of the benefits of utilising it.

• Daily reports delivered at 9 am allow staff to tag NMS scripts for ready for engagement at collections.
• Weekly reports giving line-by-line details on each NMS stage – which patient is due for an intervention or a follow-up if required and when it is due.
• Executive level dashboards allow instant visibility of top-performing branches and problem areas with one click. It also allows you to drill down to show line-by-line data if more details are required.

These reports increase efficiency, improve performance, save a lot of time and ultimately help increase profits. There are other areas that RWA’s services module covers, but I was given a word count limit for this blog so please get in touch with us if you’d like us to show you or click here to see how Pharmacy Care Plus has been able to grow their NMS by 86% after using our NMS report.

Aside from the various reports and insights that customers can access with a click, it is also the cumulative time we will save you and your team by using data analytics to drive your business as using the right information tool is almost as important as the data itself.

A webinar we did with the NPA will give you a great insight into how we save your time. Our customers Irfan Fazel from My Local Chemist, Sharon Waghorn and Karl Chapman from Ackers Chemists illustrated how we have helped them and their best practices. Our COO, Adele Curran, also demonstrated our system unveils the hidden stories behind the nomination growth in your pharmacy data by looking at the insights in your local areas – Click here to watch.