In many pharmacy organisations, management isn’t doing its job. It’s stuck doing someone else’s. Managers are working long stressful hours, but the tasks they are performing – collating reports, verifying figures with colleagues, attempting to get a clear picture of the day to day performance of the business aren’t management jobs. They are the jobs that management are forced to do when the correct support structure isn’t in place. What do you think about business intelligence in the pharmaceutical industry?
Your talent for innovating, developing opportunities and people, and creating meaningful change is simply drowned out in the ongoing need to define a start point and road map for any journey. This may have been the case for so long that firefighting is a way of life.
Managers and directors at data driven organisations have a very different working week. Imagine launching every board or management meeting with an on screen data visualisation of performance over the previous month, six months and last year. The images show at a glance how you perform across measurements unique to pharmacy – item growth, services, digital and unclaimed scripts and exemptions. In the case of items and services, they also show how four of your biggest competitors have performed over the same period of time, and how the industry as a whole performed.
Everyone in the room is prepped with the figures – the senior team were able to log into the system the day before on their desktop, laptop or even mobile phones in order to make sure this meeting is as effective as possible.
There’s an early question about delivery of services. Across the group you are hitting the targets set for service growth, but a colleague feels sure the group should be doing better. With a couple of clicks your team are now all looking at the same data showing services delivery across the group broken down by area. Good performance as a whole was being dragged back by a problem area containing 15 branches. Another click and the team are looking at a visualisation of those 15 branches – 6 of which have not raised the bar at all since the target was set.
The area manager is aware of the problem already and reports he has a plan in place to drive performance. 9 of his branches have already increased services dramatically using the line by line data on opportunities, interventions and follow ups that they receive automatically by email on a weekly and daily basis. He has arranged one to one meetings with branch managers to ensure they are using the reports correctly to identify these opportunities. He knows staff complain about particularly busy times in branches – using the Pharmacy Business Intelligence (BI) system he is able to identify hour by hour busiest times for dispensing items and can show this if needed. He also knows from looking at Local Insight branch reports, competitors within a three-mile radius are performing significantly more NMS services, so with the right focus the number of services can grow.
The national manager thanks to responsible pharmacy Business Intelligence wants to keep an eye on this – so he sets up a subscription to the area services report within the system. Now it will automatically email him with that area service report at the beginning of next month, showing him completed services, how that tracks against historic performance – and the NHS target.
Later that week there’s a scheduled web call with the board. The board has had an ongoing concern that the NHS structure for payment is overly complex, that there is no adequate system in place to manage this and that monies are being lost. Figures shown six months ago in excel sheets, which conflicted in several key areas have done nothing to inspire confidence.
With the new system, one version of the truth shows the exact picture – combining PMR data and NHS data to ensure total clarity. Things are now looking much better – the use of a BI system across all branches has helped virtually eliminate this as an issue.
A simple data visualisation shows this line falling month by month and gives a current figure. That might be enough for this call, but one director wants to understand exactly where things have been tightened up to ensure this high bar is maintained. Most of the leakage was around switches and exemptions – an area almost impossible to police without live and updated data.
Now that data flows automatically to each branch this problem shouldn’t re-occur but if they do want to see more with just a couple of clicks some headline reports and example data can be downloaded and emailed across to them during the call, or the group can screen share to see the information live in the system. This is how Business Intelligence pharmacy works.
Each interaction can now include relevant, actionable data, priorities can be easily identified, and mid- and long-term objectives can be set with performance improvement monitored on a day by day basis.
The data driven manager completes tasks quickly and effectively – now his time is freed up to properly assess some of the additional innovations his company may want to take thanks to pharmacy business intelligence to ensure their pharmacies are future facing: robots, delivery services, locker services and patient apps.
The manager already has meetings set with representatives of leading suppliers for each service: and he knows they’ll come armed with heaps of statistics on how effective their solution is. Now though, he has his own live data showing current and historical performance of his business – these will help to properly assess the impact these solutions could have on his business, and if he does decide to go ahead with any of them, ensure he negotiates a deal that is right for his group.
If your time is spent firefighting not innovating, and if you want to see a clear and easy way to get your business performing better, please contact us today at hello@rwapharmacy.com or email me directly at paul.counter@realworldanalytics.com
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