Need for Digital Solutions for Pharmacy Management
January 18, 2021Managing a pharmacy isn’t as simple as it looks. A pharmacist handles several operations from interpreting physicians’ orders to dispensing drugs to monitor patients’ drug regimens and complete their insurance forms. A small mistake in the process can be deleterious and can spoil the credibility and reputation of the business. Pharmacy Times estimates that an average of four errors occurs per day on prescriptions. Besides, numerous other errors take place while managing workflow, customer service, and accounting.
In order to minimize the inaccuracies and ambiguities, digitizing your work process with efficient pharmacy management software is the most viable solution. By integrating pharmacy software, the efficiency of your drug store gets hugely enhanced, which ultimately leads to a higher return on investment.
What Does a Pharmacy Management Solution Mean?
Before going ahead and exploring the multiple benefits that a pharmacy management software has to offer, we must comprehend what it is.
Pharmacy management software is a consolidated system that manages medications and other retail products. It automates various pharmacy operations such as stock control, claims management, drug dispensing, billing, and reporting. The software efficiently manages your store and provides real-time insights into costs, revenue, and sales that help upgrade your business’s performance.
Attributes of a Pharmacy Management Software
Pharmacy management solution is multipurpose, and its features can vary depending on the needs of the pharmacy. However, there are a few characteristics that are essential and are a must for every pharmacy software. Let us check them out.
● Inventory Management
Inventory management is one of the most crucial parameters of a pharmacy. According to the data collected by Council on Credentialing in Pharmacy, a pharmacist spends one-fifth of his day managing inventory operations. Manually managing the inventory is highly prone to human errors.
Moreover, it takes a substantial amount of time to design, track, and control manual processes. On the contrary, digital software fully automates the inventory processes and ensures error-free operations. The inventory module of your pharmacy management software must include the following features:
- Viewing of inventory status and stock levels by product and location.
- Creating purchase orders and sending them to the suppliers.
- Updating the stock levels after the customer buys a product.
- Generating reports.
- Providing real-time notifications on the shortage of medications.
● Analytics
The analytics module of pharmacy management software plays a major role in escalating the performance of your drug store. It provides key insights into your revenue, expenses, and sales that help you deliver better performance. Some of its essential features are:
- Listing suppliers and customers.
- On hand reports of the inventory.
- Generation of revenue reports (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly).
- Reports on sales, orders, trending medications, profit margins, purchase orders, etc.
● Data Management
You might have noticed that a pharmacy running in traditional ways is always occupied with lots of data and documents. By automating the work process, you enable your system to scan, store, and retrieve documents efficiently. The features that are a must for the data management module of your pharmacy software are:
- Uploading the medical data such as the prescriptions and notes from the doctor.
- Storing and viewing of medical data.
- Retrieving medical data.
● Integrations
The best part of a well-built pharmacy management software is its ability to integrate with already-usable tools of your pharmacy. If your pharmacy uses a point of sale system, you can incorporate it with your new pharmacy software to record transactions and automatically update inventory. Integration with e-prescribing software will help accelerate your processes of filling, modifying, renewing, and canceling prescriptions.
Also Read: A Powerful Pharmacy Management Software with Advanced Technology
Advantages of Implementing Pharmacy Management Software
The workflow of your pharmacy becomes highly efficient and enhanced by implementing pharmacy software. Other than that, there are many other perks that a reliable pharmacy management solution has to offer, such as:
- Seamless Supply Chain Management: The pharmacy software automatically updates the system on the selling of medical products. It also intimates the admin when the stock level is low so that the finished products can be ordered and the supply chain does not get affected.
- Improved Customer Service & Relationship: Pharmacy management software is efficiently designed to address customer issues and notify them about their appointment and the due dates for medical prescriptions. This helps in building a strong customer-business relationship.
- Optimized Workflow: Commonerrors and redundant mistakes get eliminated with the use of automated software, which results in a smooth workflow.
- Low Cost of Ownership: Expenses of the pharmacy staff gets hugely lowered as most of the operations are automatically conducted by the software, and you require a very little workforce in your pharmacy.
- Enhanced Productivity: The streamlining of pharmacy operations helps increase productivity, which further results in your store’s profitability.
- Flexible System: The pharmacy management software is highly flexible and can be customized according to the pharmacy requirements.
- Smart User Management: The software lets you assign different privileges to different users. Hence, you can manually set distinct parameters for different users.
- Speeding the Sale Procedure: With an integrated barcode scanner, you can fetch records and product details more swiftly and speed up the sale procedure.
- Real-Time Notifications: The system provides you the details of expired medicines, available and finishing stock, etc., in real-time that help you make quick decisions for your business.
- Centralized Data Storage: The software offers fast and easy storage and interactive retrieval of data that keeps your records in an organized manner.
Summing Up
A sturdy pharmacy management solution is not a luxury but a need for modern-day healthcare systems. With its integration, the pharmacies can work more efficiently, increase productivity, and keep up with customer demand. Apart from that, the software also helps make data-driven decisions that eventually results in the growth of your pharmacy business.