Transpharmation Magazine - Issue 2

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Transpharmation Magazine / Issue 2

JUNE 2015

Brian Walker, The Retail Doctor

THE JEWEL IN THE PHARMACIST’S CROWN: BRICKS BEAT CLICKS Are you in the wrong accounting relationship?

LITTLE MOVES, BIG RESULTS BIG DATA MADE EASY +

transpharmationmagazine.com.au

TESTIMONIALS “Robert is highly professional and instinctively smart...

He gets to the point and finds a way to ensure his community gain valuable insights to act on.:

Adam Posner - Directivity

“Thank you for your endeavours in bringing Transpharmation to the Pharmacy Industry, I think it’s a wonderful innovation!”

Leon Thomas - Thomas & Chong Group “Rob is doing a great job in delivering a clear message to pharmacy owners that technology is not the enemy, and that the recipe for a succesful pharmacy business is having a clear vision, well trained staff and product knowledge”

George Alam - Chemist POS Direct “I think it (The Transpharmation Show) is a great forum to encourage pharmacy owners to reflect on what they’re currently doing and to consider taking their next step in developing their retail strategy”

“Ever wondered how new software or technology can be used to drive your pharmacy business?

Follow Robert Sztar’s Transpharmation Series and you will surely be enlightened!”

Ashley Falting - Health Enterprises

Andrew Hall - Minfos

“Transpharmation is a simple way for pharmacy owners to understand how technology can help their business.”

Craig Simmonds - iHealth

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Transpharmation Magazine / Issue 2

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CONTENTS

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Tra n s p h a r m a t i o n Ma g a z i n e / Is s u e 2

ABOUT TRANSPHARMATION

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FROM THE EDITOR

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m

T

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HOW CAN I IMPROVE MY OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY? My Money - Amanda Fisher Pharmacy Accounting: Are you in the wrong

relationship?

p

My Pharmacy - Brian Walker Forget Digital: Bricks & Mortar Business is the jewel in the pharmacist’s crown

t

My Team - Michael Hazilias

p

www.transpharmationmagazine.com.au

The five hurdles of pharmacy payroll

HOW CAN I CREATE A PATIENT CENTRIC BUSINESS MODEL?

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My Patients – Wim Battaerd financial year, and enhance the human touch in your

i p

Innovation – Cathie Reid

m a

Advertising Enquiries: magazine@pharmactive.com.au

times each year by Pharmactive Pty Ltd © 2015 Pharmactive Pty Ltd. All Transpharmation

My Partners – Heath Tully

Magazine material is copyright. Reproduction in whole or in part is not permitted without the

Your first 5 totally manageable moves toward a

written permission of the publisher.

multi-channel pharmacy

i

Editor: Robert Sztar

The Transpharmation Magazine is published 4

‘It’s time to get face to face with telehealth’

HOW CAN I LEVERAGE SMART TECHNOLOGY IN MY BUSINESS?

CONTACT rsztar@pharmactive.com.au

Do you want to add 22% more revenue in the next

pharmacy?

AUSTRALIA’S FIRST PHARMACY & TECHNOLOGY PUBLICATION

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Pharmactive Pty Ltd

Founder & Chief Transpharmation

IT Systems - Mike Da Gama

Officer: Robert Sztar

Is Big Data the stuff of Sci-Fi?

23 Milton Parade, Malvern VIC 3144

Mobility - Josh Swinnerton

1300 798 995

Mobile Medication Management: Why, How, And When?

Automation – Robert Allen

www.pharmactive.com.au ACN: 107 301 262

Little Moves, Big Results Transpharmation Magazine / Issue 2

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Did you miss Issue 1?

Click here to SUBSCRIBE

WHAT IS TRANSPHARMATION MAGAZINE? It is a multimedia e-magazine designed to provide pharmacy owners like you with easy to follow and accessible educational resources to help you understand the functions and applications of the latest technology. It is the only e-magazine of its kind created by a pharmacist for pharmacists.

Transpharmation demystifies the evolving landscape of technology that will help you increase profits, design remarkable patient experiences, and scale your business to its infinite potential.

In each issue, you will discover and receive bite sized strategic insights that you can use to maximise your biggest opportunities in 9 critical areas that are pivotal to a sustainable and thriving 21st century pharmacy: Your Money, Your Pharmacy Operations, Your Team, Your Patients, Your Partners, Innovation, IT Systems, Mobility, and Automation.

We aim to constantly review and optimise our best practices to ensure that you feel confident that you have the tools to help you re-connect with your passion for primary healthcare and design your lifestyle both in and out of the pharmacy.

HOW DO I KNOW WHICH AREA’S I SHOULD FOCUS ON?

You will notice this Icon at the top of each article

which if you click on it will take you to the ‘Pharmacy

Freedom Index’ which is a 7-10 minute FREE diagnostic test that will help you discover your area’s of opportunity.

Click on the image / icon below to view a short video which will tell you a little more: Each of the 9 sections include a summary article, and in most cases an extended interview which you can listen and expand your education.

WHY YOU SHOULD TAKE THE PHARMACY FREEDOM INDEX? Simply click on the image to watch instantly.

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Transpharmation Magazine / Issue 2

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“

FROM THE EDITOR

Now that we’ve almost completed the first half of 2015, I wanted to take a moment to ref lect on the rapidly evolving landscape of Australian community pharmacy.

There has never been a time where we’ve

pharmacy forefathers used to great effect

we must maximise our return on our

all felt the ground shift, and change shape

to determine their merchandise, services,

space and stock. The only accurate, and

more, which ultimately leaves us feeling

and specialities.

sustainable manner to do this effectively

less certain of our business and pharmacy

In 2015, its not simply just listening when

is by amplifying our listening through

futures. But, the real challenge being thrown down to us is: that in the face of adversity, will we choose to dwell on

engaged in face-to-face conversation, but also in the high-traffic areas of popular

technology, which has never been more accessible, inexpensive, and remarkable in

social media where our customers

the insight it can enable.

(including the largest growth demographic

Underlining this is the fact that the

- Over 55’s Men & Women) spend hours

transaction economy is dying, and the

each day (eg. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,

wisdom economy is rising, where to remain

I believe there has never been a better

YouTube etc.), and understanding trends

relevant to our patients, we must transform

time for all pharmacists to re-connect

amongst our underutilised pharmacy data

our businesses to create value beyond

with our passion, our purpose in our

vaults. These 3 sources if utilised well

price.

communities, and most importantly our

will enable us to personalise our in-store

patients who will ultimately decide our

experience to the exact needs of our

This 2nd issue of Transpharmation brings

future. We only need to glance at the

communities and of course individual

pharmacy’s of yesteryear before brands,

patients. Now you may be thinking.. this

manufacturers, and distributors existed to

all sounds to hard.. too expensive.. And

uncover the critical key to their success.

unnecessary, but as operating costs keep

This critical skill is listening, which our

rising & dispensary revenue keeps falling

external, largely uncontrollable factors that threaten our existence, or will we choose to search outside our comfort zones?

to you 9 bite-sized strategies from some of Australia’s leading experts to help kick start your journey of success and prosperity.

Here’s to creating your ‘Pharmacy Freedom’ together!

CHECK OUT MY SHORT VIDEO Simply click on the image and be directed to the video URL

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Transpharmation Magazine / Issue 2

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MY MONEY

HOW CAN I IMPROVE MY OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY? Create Cash Flow

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Transpharmation Magazine / Issue 2

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How can I improve my Operational Efficiency? My Money

How do I rate for My Money?

Click here to find out!

PHARMACY ACCOUNTING:

ARE YOU IN THE WRONG RELATIONSHIP? with Amanda Fisher

Author, Chartered Accountant and Founder of Connected Accountants I bet you never thought of getting closer to your accountant. Most small business owners meet up with their number crunchers once a quarter, maybe once a month, to check the books, review the bottom line figure or file a BAS return. This is what I call a deadend relationship. It’s functional but it’s minimal. It covers your obligations but it’s deeply unsatisfying. It’s friendly but it’s joyless. It’s not that the spark has gone; it’s just that there never was spark. The real needs of your business are not being met in this kind of relationship. Move on.

Move to Cloud Accounting.

BRINGS YOU TWO CLOSER TOGETHER The Cloud enables collaboration.

Whereas traditionally you would work on your accounts by yourself, stick it on a hard drive, schlep it over to your accountant, where he or she would work on it some more, by themselves, then they’d schlep it back over to you. Maybe you would meet or chat on the phone to confirm or comment on something, but essentially it’s a linear and lonesome old process.

With Cloud Accounting, you can screen-share your accounts at the same time, any time, any place, as long as you both have internet connection. Rather than having to have everyone in the room together and only being able to work on a single file at the same time, you can video-conference or chat over the phone while you’re looking at the same books. And you can join up not just with your accountant, but with Back to Contents Page

your bookkeeper, your spouse, your administrator or anyone else in the business that works on your financial information. In Xero, for example, which is the Cloud service we partner with, you can click a button or flag something on your accounts to send a quick query to your accountant.

They can instantly see what you’re referring to and reply.

As soon as you start to work this way you’ll begin to see your accountant in a whole new light. You’ll start to find them more interesting, you’ll see them as the advisors and experts they really are, not the compliance box-tickers you once thought. You’ll end up talking more often, your conversations will be livelier, you’ll find more opportunities to call them with a quick question, they’ll find reasons to call you out the blue.

Things will blossom

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SO WHAT IS CLOUD ACCOUNTING?

It’s accounting. But it’s in the Cloud, i.e. online. You store all your accounts data and software on a remote server and you access it via the internet.

You log in – from wherever you are – to see your accounts. You can give access to other people and you can all see your data at the same time from wherever you all are.

You no longer need to buy your own accounting software (and costly updates) as the packages all sit ‘in the Cloud’ and are kept bang upto-date for you. You pay a monthly subscription.

And you no longer need oodles of hard drive space to store accounting packages or data.

Transpharmation Magazine / Issue 2

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How can I improve my Operational Efficiency? My Money

YOU CAN PLAN A FUTURE Not only will you find more things to talk about with Cloud Accounting, you and your accountant will also begin to plan a future. Too often, we do our accounts to work out what happened in the past, what went wrong last year, last month and so on. As far as our business is concerned we’re dragging up ancient history. Usually it’s too long back to figure out what went wrong anyway. Any chance of fixing the problems has already passed us by. But with Cloud Accounting you can see today’s data today. You can recognise patterns, see problems building and work together with your accountant to nip them in the bud. Similarly you can spot profit opportunities, ways to improve efficiency, look forward and plan ahead.

Accounting stops being a monthly obligation and starts becoming a daily opportunity. Because with

Xero, your accounts are more easily accessible and readily available, we have clients who are ‘doing their accounts’ every day.

They log in first thing in the morning, reconcile the bank account for 10 minutes and then spend 10 minutes looking at dashboards and reports knowing that the figures are accurate and up to date to that day. So you go from this kind of last-minute panic: “Is our BAS up to date? How did I do this month?

Am I going to have enough to meet all of our obligations? Can I afford to go on holiday? Can I afford to pay myself?” to more forwardlooking stimulation: “How does my front-of-shop compare with the drug side? Where is my GP growth happening? How are my expenses flowing? Should I drop the overtime for particular staff? My gross profit’s dropped by two per cent in the last month, let’s look at that.”

YOU CAN SPREAD THE LOVE Cloud Accounting is actually not just about your accounts. It’s about your customers.

“This week we’ve got a discount

The numbers are just the starting point but once you get into Cloud services, you can start to do some really amazing things.

customers who sleep very well, it’s

Eventually you can import metrics from other systems such as your dispensary data, inventory, rostering, payroll, CRM, POS, marketing, loyalty card and so on.

feet, you can offer them products

Like fitting together data Lego bricks, it allows you to build up your patient-knowledge, have more informed, targeted conversations with them, provide a more relevant service and above all make them feel valued.

As a customer there’s nothing more irritating than going in and getting a generic marketing blast 8

Transpharmation Magazine / Issue 2

on shampoo and a special session on sleep issues.” For bald irrelevant.

But if you know they’re diabetic

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YOU’LL HAVE MORE TIME FOR THE FUN STUFF One of our clients, a pharmacist, used to do his bookkeeping himself. He used to work from his home office every Monday, so he wasn’t even in his pharmacy He would spend his entire Monday doing the books, updating the accounting system, doing his ordering, payroll, data entry, reconciling the bank account, all day.

Now we transitioned him across to Cloud Accounting he spends about two hours doing all that. So he has six new hours to spend in his pharmacy every week. He actually uses a couple of those hours looking at KPIs and metrics with his accountant in a more analytical capacity, honing in on issues, challenges and opportunities.

You can start to see the trends, what’s good, what’s bad, what’s gone up, what’s gone down. You can play around with the data at the weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual level or zip around between them all. And once a business stops chasing its tail, a kind of calm descends on it. Business owners who know exactly where they are financially placed tend to sleep better and enjoy life more. It frees them up from “I’ve got to go home and spend all night processing those invoices; I don’t know where I’m at and the bookkeeper’s not coming for another two weeks; There’s no money in the bank and the BAS is due today”.

and suffer problems with their and services they really value, win their loyalty and their spend.

So switching to the Cloud is rewarding for a pharmacist in more ways than one. It starts by reinvigorating a flagging and dutiful relationship with an accountant.

It ends up repairing your worklife balance, freeing you up for

LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW with Amanda Fisher

higher value activities, enriching your customer relationships and

Simply click on the icon above

improving your bottom line.

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MY PHARMACY

HOW CAN I IMPROVE MY OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY? Building Systems

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Transpharmation Magazine / Issue 2

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How do I rate for My Pharmacy?

Click here to find out!

FORGET DIGITAL:

BRICKS & MORTAR BUSINESS IS THE JEWEL IN THE PHARMACIST’S CROWN Physical stores have been under the darkening shadow of online retail ever since the dawn of the internet. We’ve all assumed that one day our doors will close forever as traditional shopping habits fall by the wayside. But Brian Walker, Founder & CEO of Retail Doctor Group reassures us that our stores’ physical presence is the actually the strongest string in our bow.

Q. SO WE CAN RELAX? ONLINE RETAIL IS NOT A BIG THREAT TO OUR BUSINESS?

owners can really capitalise on the fact they have a physical presence.

Online retail is a big deal but not in the way many people feared it would be.

Retail sales nationally across all categories are around about $290 billion. Only eight or nine per cent of that takes place online. At Retail Doctor, we’ve always said that online was never going to overtake physical store shopping. And in fact, the last six months has seen online sales levelling out in many categories – and in some cases not even meeting last year’s numbers. But we cannot ignore online as a channel: it’s incredibly important as a research engine. Pharmacies will need visibility and a digital presence.Around 86% of people go online to pre-research a purchase or a decision and 70% of us do it via smartphones; we’re using technology to understand retailers and their offers.

Q.

Q. HOW SHOULD PHARMACISTS DEVELOP THEIR ONLINE CHANNELS?

SO CAN PURELY OFFLINE BRANDS STILL SURVIVE AND THRIVE?

We need to allow customers to be in touch with us whenever they want, from wherever they want. It’s not even about ‘offline’ or ‘online’ any more, these terms are slowly becoming outdated; what we talk about now is the idea of a 24/7 brand. When we look at the classic channels of physical store, web, phone, social media, and all the ways a customer gets in touch with us, they are all interconnected. The classic path to purchase that goes: “I see an advertisement, I see the shop and I respond in this linear way” has been absolutely shattered by disruptive technological forces in retail. So even purely physical brands with a big old billboard out on the highway are going to need to provide different touch points for customers.

The physical store is the jewel in the crown. Although 86% of people research online, only a small percentage of us actually buy online. Market research tells us that 88% of consumers still want to physically touch products and visit physical stores. They use online channels to research, understand, interpret and communicate via social media, but they still want to go into the store.

And particularly in an environment like pharmacy, which is big on advice, facetime, consultation and emotion, business

To appear on people’s radar in the pre-purchase phase, you’ve got to map your customers’ journey and understand how they get to the point where they’re actually walking in your door.

It’s about catching them while they’re researching their conditions and diagnoses (diabetes, arthritis, pregnancy, vitamins, wellness, child nutrition, etc.), before they decide what they need, and drawing them into store using relevant services, products and

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Transpharmation Magazine / Issue 2

offers via your website, social media, word of mouth, or even with classic advertising if that’s still working for you with a decent Return on Investment (ROI).

Q. HOW CAN PHARMACISTS MAXIMISE THE PROFITABILITY OF THEIR PHYSICAL SPACE? I would say most pharmacies have about 80% of their floor space devoted to dispensing and 20% devoted to retail. I would aim to gradually switch that ratio around, so 80% of your store is selling. Even if you get to somewhere around 50:50 you’re helping to bolster your profit against PBS reforms and other income-sappers the industry is suffering from. If your business is too reliant on dispensing income, that doesn’t fill me with great confidence that you will be able to weather all storms, going forward.

Having said that, retail does not mean, stack ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap, unless you start all over again and copy the business model of Chemist Warehouse.

Don’t react to revenue pressures by adding more stock, higher shelves and cramming it all in. It’s about connecting with customers through remarkable experiences. Make your store educational, informative, categorised, organised, unique, it’s a little bit inspiring. I call it high fitness retail: high productivity, high profitability, high customer connection and high focus on uniqueness of offer.

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How can I improve my Operational Efficiency? My Pharmacy

Q. HOW IS IT POSSIBLE TO CREATE A ‘UNIQUE’ OFFER IN PHARMACY?

with consumers concerning the idea of trust. That is such an important emotional attribute for any brand and once you have it you should look after it very carefully. Other retailers spend millions of dollars trying to emulate trust as a value.

In technology circles you always hear about things that are new and different.

The reality is that when it comes to consumers, ‘old’ is the new ‘new’. We want to replicate some of the feeling I personally think the ‘stack of those old-school community it high, watch it fly’ pharmacies from the 1800s, discounting strategy when you had no brands heavily undermines or manufacturers, and that position of Every pharmacy the pharmacy was trust. It’s true, owner should ask: known for listening to most pharmacies “Actually, why would people’s needs and are too ‘vanilla’, a customer come to compounding products trying to be us?

What makes us to suit individual everything to special? What are customers. That core of everyone, but only our strengths...” serving the community one brand can ever hasn’t changed but be the cheapest and what businesses price-driven customers will need to layer on always find it. Unless your entire business top of that is a differentiating message model revolves around high volume, to give to their community, to stand out low margins, high traffic, find a nonfrom the rest. price point of difference, or you’ll get Every pharmacy owner should ask: hammered.

“Actually, why would a customer come Q. to us? What makes us special? What are our strengths? How are we making the most of them? How are we marketing them? What are we in this business for?

Well the first thing that needs to be What do we want to be great at? What on the table is the business plan. It are we good at? How do we build on doesn’t have to be War and Peace, just that? What’s unique about us? What are a page that basically says: “Here’s what the attributes of our brand? How long we need to achieve in terms of sales, has our business been around? Who are margin growth, business mix, number our customers? What sort of customers of customers, average spend, items do we want to attract more of? What per sale”. Then add your targets and are the needs in the marketplace? customer satisfaction scores and share it Does our demographic have a higher with your team. Allocate resources that ratio of retirees, a higher ratio of young are going to help you build the business; children or a higher ratio of stressed-out for example I always advocate having a executives?” Look at your database, do retail specialist in the business and some some simple research, then build a model marketing support, but find what you that tailors to that. think your own resource gaps are and fill Q. them.

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a clear messaging? Where do your customers go when they walk in: straight to the dispensing area and straight out again? Can you create different customer zones? What effect might better lighting or more seating have? What kind of experience do your employees create?

! RETAIL DOCTOR’S SUSTAINABLE MODEL: 1. Pre-purchase: visible uniqueness 2. In-store: a great retail-led experience 3. Post-purchase: regular follow up to stay in contact.

When you do this well, loyalty will follow.

Loyalty is not about discounting; loyalty in pharmacy is about trust, relationships, understanding and being part of the community. Your physical store is where all this comes to roost, make good use of it.

SO WHAT ARE THE FIRST STEPS TO ‘FITTER RETAIL’ FOR SMALL TO MEDIUM SIZED PHARMACIES?

A LOT OF ONLINE NOISE IS ABOUT LOW PRICES. SHOULD PHARMACISTS FOLLOW SUIT?

Take Chemist Warehouse. Their distinct point of difference is that they claim to offer the lowest prices, every single day in every single store. Historically, pharmacists have an extremely highly respected and hard-earned relationship Back to Contents Page

Then look around you at retailers you admire in different categories. What can you learn? What are they doing with shop layout? How do they manage footfall? What does busy look like? How long do customers stay? Then take a look at your pharmacy. Does your point of difference resonate? Do you have

TUNE IN TO THE SHOW

LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW with Brian Walker Simply click on the icon above

Transpharmation Magazine / Issue 2

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It’s predicted that nearly 9000 jobs will need to be cut in pharmacy this year.

Cutting staff will boost short-term profits, but it’s not the best long-term approach.

View our whitepaper for tips on reducing costs whilst retaining the staff you have invested in.

GET THE WHITE PAPER

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Transpharmation Magazine / Issue 2

www.easyemployer.com

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How can I improve my Operational Efficiency? My Team

How do I rate for My Team?

Click here to find out!

THE FIVE HURDLES OF PHARMACY PAYROLL

By Michael Hazilias

Making it to the end of a payroll cycle with the right amount paid out: that’s the goal. But to get there, you’ve got to clear several hurdles. If your business stumbles, or is flawed, at any stage, you can face major set-backs and serious errors. Among other ramifications, you risk overpaying your workers, blowing out your staffing budget or not complying with industry Awards - with all the headaches that follow.

At easyEMPLOYER, we’ve been working with pharmacists for more than 10 years, so we understand your industry. And as technologists, we know about the tools that will help you clear each hurdle.

HURDLE #1: ROSTERING STAFF Where pharmacies trip up: It’s a fine balance: getting the right level of experienced staff to match the ebbs and flows of customers over the hours, days, weeks and months. When pharmacies rely on ‘guestimation’, we often see them overshooting or falling short of the mark. In an over-staffed pharmacy, staff stand idle in slower periods.

Understaffing can be even more costly in the long run. Customers aren’t attended to quickly enough which means sales are lost and it costs customer loyalty.

How to clear this hurdle: Instead of relying on intuition and guesswork, use automatic roster generation to get optimal staffing levels. How does it work? Once you’ve determined what shifts to fill, the software automatically assigns the shifts to meet requirements.

And with instant access to rosters from a template or previous periods (i.e. this period last year), you have a ready reference to help make informed, intelligent rostering decisions. No more guestimation!

HURDLE #2: TIME-CLOCKING Where pharmacies trip up: Even pharmacies that have adopted cutting-edge time-capture technology like finger-print scanners often don’t have intelligent systems behind the device. When the scanner is linked with your rostering and fully integrated with your payroll systems, a whole raft of possibilities open up. Pharmacies can instantly compare the time-clocking data against rosters for accurate and useful variance reports. You can fully automate the entire payroll process, from an employee clocking on each morning, right

through to them receiving money in the bank.

Without that intelligent integration, all you have is an expensive punch-clock.

At a minimum, a pharmacy should have biometric time clocking because whenever staff are left to manually enter data, there are going to be errors. Much of this will be down to mistyping. However, in a handful of cases, staff deliberately fudge the numbers i.e. they enter themselves as starting work at 9.00, when they didn’t actually turn up till 9.05.

Paying an extra five minutes here and there seems like a small cost but it really adds up.

For example, let’s take a pharmacy of 20 employees with an average pay rate of $20 per hour. Just five minutes of time-creep a day will cost that pharmacy $35,000 a year!

How to clear this hurdle: Use automatic time capture technology to eliminate the chance of human error. If your timesheet receives data directly from a time scanner, there’s no room for your staff to get their times mixed up or for deliberate manipulation.

HURDLE #3: TIMESHEET MANAGEMENT Where pharmacies trip up: It’s a big ask.

Every pay period, a load of timesheets lands on the manager’s desk, all of which have to be checked through for errors and glitches.

Manual timesheet management leaves room for human error. Your staff member makes a mistake, and you don’t pick it up. It’s almost inevitable that something slips through.

At other times, the data is accurate but doesn’t fit your business rules. For example, if your staffing budget is tight, you might decide to rein in overtime. What if a staff member doesn’t do everything during their Back to Contents Page

shift so they decide to stay back to get through all the filing and get themselves some overtime? Should you pay for that? If you spot it while sorting the timesheets, you can query it with the staff member. But if you miss it, it could become an ongoing thing, costing you money.

How to clear this hurdle: Automation is a game-changer for quality assurance.

Managers don’t need to slog through every line of data in every timesheet. Instead, they can jump straight to the alerts, which are there to bring attention to anomalies, and

make a judgement call.

With automation you can also set business rules (such as whether overtime is permitted) and configure your workforce management software to flag exceptions and suggest solutions i.e. Suzy has worked over time and it gets flagged. Do you approve the exception (and pay the overtime, for example), or do you decline it. With automation, the manager is free to actually manage — to make judgment calls — rather than burning up time checking spreadsheets by hand.

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How can I improve my Operational Efficiency? My Team

HURDLE #5: PAYING STAFF

HURDLE #4: AWARD MANAGEMENT Where pharmacies trip up: Are you confident that your Award information is up-to-date? If you haven’t updated your systems, you can find yourself very quickly accruing a large payroll debt to your staff.

It gets even more complicated. Are your systems set up to easily handle cases where staff step up to fill in for more senior roles? For example, Janice is filling in as managing pharmacist. Of course her pay should be increased to the higher rate. However, we often see pharmacies tripping up when multipliers come into

play i.e. Janice works ANZAC day. By rights, she should be paid at the higher rate multiplied by the public holiday rate. Instead, some pharmacies would mistakenly apply the public holiday rate to Janice’s original rate.

How to clear this hurdle: To stay upto-date with Award increases, it’s worth considering Award management services.

This is where your solution provider automatically updates your system’s Award data, so you know it’s always accurate.

JUMPING THESE HURDLES Before you can even find ways to better jump staff management hurdles you have to first identify where they are in your business.

At easyEMPLOYER, we help businesses get total visibility and understanding of all of the elements of their staff management, and then we help them clear all of the hurdles.

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assesses your current workforce management practices and finds ways to streamline your systems and processes. The Health Check can help save up to 95% of time currently spent managing your staff and up to 10% of your weekly payroll.

Where pharmacies trip up: We come back to manual handling for this error. There are still some pharmacies manually entering payroll. There’s room for data entry errors - or worse, if the staff member responsible for payroll is out of action, whose going to pay your staff and do they have the knowledge to get it right? How to clear this hurdle: Look for a workforce management system that integrates with major payroll providers, so you’re automating as much of the chain as possible. That’s definitely a plus in the pharmacy sector, given the varying rates managers have to deal with. Ideally, look for a workforce management system with its own fully integrated payroll plug-in and/ or a managed payroll service. You eliminate the headache and double-processing of maintaining two systems.

The Workforce Management Health Check is usually a one-off investment of $1495 but for Transpharmation We do this with our comprehensive readers it will be conducted as a a FREE Workforce Management Health easyEMPLOYER is currently offering Check. The Health Check complimentary service. workforce management health checka for easyEMPLOYER is currently offering FREE

pharmacies valuedhealth at $1495. workforce management check for pharmacies valued at $1495.

Register your interest your free Health Check help you checkof your staff management workf lows and It’s a in great opportunity to and get let anus assessment the way you currently manage your staff and administrative practices refine your processes,tosoget you an can assessment quickly and easily It’s a and great opportunity of complete error-free pay runs, every time. how it can bemanage done better. the way you currently your staff and how it can be done better. easyEMPLOYER is currently offering a FREE workforce management health check for pharmacies valued at $1495.

It’s a great opportunity to get an assessment of the way you currently manage your staff and how it can be done better.

CHECK IT OUT CHECK IT OUT www.easyemployer.com www.easyemployer.com 14

Transpharmation Magazine / Issue 2

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Connect like never before IN

PHAR MAC Y

PharmEngage - the new and engaging pharmacy software solution that connects patients to pharmacies, improving revenue by as much as $100,000/pa.

AT HOM E

Our integrated CRM brings together a customer loyalty program, a wellness portal and an e-commerce platform simply and effectively improving your pharmacy’s revenue.

PharmEngage are long term digital business partners of Discount Drug Stores. We have implemented their Medication Management platform and new e-commerce platform across our 136 stores. We are achieving higher levels of medication compliance and much greater customer loyalty. Next is our loyalty program, due to launch in July, followed by a fully integrated App. Engaging our customers, in store, online and on mobile devices, is the beginning of an enriched relationship.

www.pharmengage.com | info@pharmengage.com | 1300 172 151

Doug Kuskopf-Dallas Executive General Manager Discount Drug Stores

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DO YOU WANT TO ADD 22% MORE REVENUE IN THE NEXT FINANCIAL YEAR, AND ENHANCE THE HUMAN TOUCH IN YOUR PHARMACY? Are you ready to jump on the bandwagon of automation for better business performance but worried that pharmacy automation might cause you to lose the human touch that your customers value so much? Wim Battaerd, co-founder of PharmEngage argues that the right technologies will in fact strengthen patient relationships while increasing revenues…

MY PATIENTS Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is one of those buzzwords that come up all the time when we talk about pharmacy automation but CRM is in fact not new and not complicated.

But what kind of experience will it be for our customers when the technology is finally running the show?

Customers love staff for many reasons: the smile, the welcome, the friendly face and much more. Pharmacy professionals and front-­of-­store colleagues will always have prime position in the healthcare shopping experience. But there are areas of activity where we’d all be more than happy for the technology to take things off our hands. Here are the four elements you should be focusing on when it comes to customer centered business.

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MEMORY: “GOOD MORNING MRS SMITH, HOW’S YOUR BACK TODAY?”

Here, technology can help. Even the simplest of CRM systems allows you to recognise a customer (by entering their name onto your iPad or a scanning their loyalty card at the till), you can see their medications, conditions, past purchases, allergies, preferences and all kinds of notes on anything you’ve previously added. A good CRM does the hard work for you and even interacts with the customer to get the most recent details covered as well. Your staff don’t have to go back to the beginning and your customers don’t have to retell their tale. With the

addition of a few clever algorithms, the CRM should give you some meaningful insights, suggestions and recommendations for advice, crosssells and marketing.

“PharmEngage’s CRM, is running in all Discount Drugstores. It has shown in case studies a consistent 22% increase in compliance and prescriptions filled in stores for registered customers! (The case study is available by contacting PharmEngage)”

WATCH THIS VIDEO AND FIND OUT HOW TO ENGAGE YOUR CUSTOMERS info@pharmengage.com Phone 1300 172 151

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How can I create a Patient Centric Business Model? My Paitents

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RELEVANCE: “I WAS THINKING… YOU MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN THIS…”

Personalisation is not just a whimsical concept that doesn’t exist yet. Apple do it, Dominos do it. You can certainly do it with primary healthcare services that directly drive the quality of our lives. Take customers with diabetes for example, which is a highly complicated condition to manage. Pharmacists have so much to offer beyond dispensing prescriptions. Make your customers think: “Why would I go anywhere else because I’m getting everything I need

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here?” A reliable and relevant customer profile will assist in providing the right services.

One of the real opportunities for pharmacists is to position their pharmacy as a unique source of trustworthy healthcare information. Your website for example, could provide online healthcare information, advice, products and services that have all been screened and deemed reliable and relevant. Even

CONVENIENCE: “I’M PROVIDING THIS TO HELP SAVE YOU TIME AND HASSLE.”

Pharmacists have been medical experts for centuries – and long shall they remain so.

But patients are now choosing the kind of healthcare experience that they want. And then “Actually, while I’m sitting on the bus, I want to order and pay for my prescription via an app and have it delivered to my office or to my home. I want to spend my voucher and collect my loyalty points while I’m at it. I want to look at and change my patient profile from home and when I go into the store I want them to see all my recent activity.”

Wim Battaerd: “Again technology can help. That level of efficiency will permit your pharmacy to engage with the customer and provide the services that will lead to more and better healthcare recommendations, and we at PharmEngage can deliver that for your pharmacy”..

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better you can provide a personal and closed health & wellness portal to your customers that contain all the relevant information for them . It can send (email or print) prescription reminders, newsletters or other resources specifically for diabetics, all driven by the customer profiles from your CRM database. After all marketing is just the conversation you have with customers when they’re not in front of you. It can be just as engaging, relevant and fruitful.

LOYALTY & REWARDS: “GREAT MR JONES, I THINK YOU’RE AFTER ....”

Nowadays customers compare shopping experiences, they are informed and seek consistency in service and quality. What if you could reward a customer for taking part in your vaccination campaign or your baby club event?

Suppose, as a customer, I would receive a dedicated reward for my relationship with the pharmacy, and this reward is relevant for my condition. Pharmacists need to be on top of this game and make sure that we retain as well as attract customers time after time again.

Customers are beginning to expect experiences that transition

seamlessly between online and offline channels. Pharmacies need to think in terms of a single customer journey, not one instore, one online and one mobile.

We need to shift our relationship from being “Come and get it” to “Here I’m making it easily available for you”. As soon as you map processes and experiences with the customer at the heart, you start to see interoperable, cloud-­ based CRM technology simply as an enabler linking your POS, your dispensing system, your database, your website, everything.

Wim Battaerd: “E-commerce platforms and loyalty programs are widely available, also in the pharmacy industry, but few are capable to merge into a seamless customer experience.

PharmEngage has done it and it is all about customer centricity and customer engagement, we are here to help the pharmacy business”

Far from being the death knell for human interaction, technology can in fact help pharmacists strengthen their position as the most trusted, most accessible go-­to healthcare advisor in the community by engaging customers with smart technology.

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INNOVATION

HOW CAN I CREATE A PATIENT CENTRIC BUSINESS MODEL? Create with your patients for your patients

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How can I create a Patient Centric Business Model? Innovation

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IT’S TIME TO GET FACE TO FACE WITH TELEHEALTH’ While face-to-face, in-person interactions will always continue to play a key role in the delivery of healthcare services, it’s time we got serious about adding face-to-face screen based interactions into the healthcare mix.

A C

ustralia is ideally placed to embrace telehealth. We have an extremely small population in global terms spread across a broad geographic

landscape, and access to healthcare regularly involves significant travel and time, even for those who live in major metropolitan areas.

There’s been a range of telehealth pilots and initiatives, but the majority that I have seen tend to involve a cumbersome set up on a ‘telehealth trolley’ or in the special ‘telehealth room,’ with the end result being that they are often rarely utilised as they don’t easily integrate into people’s regular work patterns.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of examples of medical practitioners doing a fantastic job of delivering services via telehealth, particularly into remote and regional areas, but I think it’s very fair to say that it still doesn’t play a regular role in day to day activity for the majority of practitioners. And let’s not even get started on pharmacy, where user scenarios which see pharmacists engaging with their patients in this manner are virtually nonexistent at this point.

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This article was originally published on cathiereid.com and has been re-published with the author’s permission.

The exact opposite is the case in our It was important too that the personal and broader business lives. I conversations could take place in travel a lot, and video conversations are locations that were convenient and easily a huge enabler for me staying connected accessible. We were adamant that, as with with family and colleagues. I FaceTime other lifestyle videoconferencing tools, all Stuart and the kids whenever I get the parties had to be able to engage using chance when I’m away and regularly both the technology and the location participate in business meetings that suited them. with colleagues from all over With those criteria the world via Google non-negotiable, it Hangouts, Skype, The style of should come as no GoToMeeting and conversation which surprise that the so on. The style of occurs over a video solution that we conversation which link is vastly different have settled on is occurs over a video to that which takes one that we found link is vastly different place via a phone call, in the US, which to that which takes and definitely delivers is app-based and place via a phone an increased level of accessible using a call, and definitely engagement.” wide range of devices: delivers an iPhones, iPads, Android increased level of devices, PCs, laptops — even engagement.

Google Glass. It’s fully HIPAA compliant When we started looking for a telehealth (HIPAA referring to the US regulation solution for Epic Pharmacy to engage designed to protect personal information with patients and colleagues, we were and data stored in medical records, adamant it had to deliver all of the generally viewed as the ‘gold standard’ accessibility and ease of use benefits for privacy and security guidelines for that these lifestyle tools did, with the health technology). added requirement of ensuring that,

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due to the confidential nature of health conversations, the appropriate security and privacy safeguards were in place.

Once we had identified the technology we wanted to work with, there were no shortage of user scenarios.

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How can I create a Patient Centric Business Model? Innovation

We recognised that our patients who are undertaking chemotherapy could benefit from a consultation about their medication regime with one of our specialty oncology pharmacists. Cancer treatment nearly always involves travel to a specialist facility and patients can easily get information overload while meeting with the various members of their treatment team. Being able to schedule a video call with a highly trained oncology specialist pharmacist can assist with better informing them on what to expect and how to best manage potential side effects and also easily allows them to include other family members in the conversation if they wish.

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WE HAVE LAUNCHED OUR APPLICATION

We’ve launched the application to our residential aged care clients, enabling our aged care pharmacists to engage in face-toface conversations with both the staff and residents at residential care facilities, increasing their accessibility enormously.

We also see a really strong role in training, with team members able to undertake assessments and illustrate their understanding via mechanisms other than writing down answers or ticking multichoice boxes. The hands free

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Transpharmation Magazine / Issue 2

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functionality of Google Glass is allowing us to deliver training and assessment via videolinks for

tasks such as the reconstitution of oncology products, and extend that further into workflow redesign.

These are just a few of the first utilisations we are looking at.

Every conversation we have with our Epic team throws up more potential, and once patients join in those conversations this will grow exponentially.

Telehealth has been a buzzword in healthcare for an extended period of time, but the time has come to stop talking about its potential and get on with making it a regular part of everyday healthcare access.

The technology is here and we think the opportunity is epic!

Resources please click the icons below for the following links Video 1 - Epic Telepharmacy - connecting the clinical team https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGXMoSZYNuI Video 2 - Epic Telepharmacy - connecting with our patients https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BerIZDBRXd0

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MY PARTNERS

HOW CAN I CREATE A PATIENT CENTRIC BUSINESS MODEL? Collaborate to create a win-win result

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Transpharmation Magazine / Issue 2

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MY PARTNERS

YOUR FIRST 5 TOTALLY MANAGEABLE MOVES TOWARDS A MULTI-CHANNEL PHARMACY Heath Tully, E-Commerce Marketing Manager for Sigma offers a foolproof five-point plan for pharmacists making their first foray into the digital space.

1 MAKE YOUR WEBSITE HEALTH CONTENT-RICH You might think the be-all-and-endall of an online presence is to sell products and bring in financial return on your investment in digital. Think a little broader than ROI per channel.

An effective website is a sticky website: one that makes people keep coming back, one that makes people remember and trust your brand.

Eventually they’ll buy or come into store, but the first step is stickiness.

To make your site sticky create a health information portal rather than just an online shop. You can develop a particular subject specialism if you

have one, or you can go generic to start with. More and more people are now asking Google about health conditions and medications. They should be asking you. When it comes to reliability and accuracy, the internet is the wild wild west. Ride on into town and give those good folk a health resource they can trust.

Remember: Keep your website content fresh and up-to-date. Old information looks as off-putting as a dusty old gondola end that’s been left untouched for months.

2 ADD LIVE CHAT TO YOUR WEBSITE You wouldn’t let a customer walk into your pharmacy and wander round without a friendly “Hello, how can I help you today?” Live chat is surprisingly easy to implement and relatively costeffective, and is a great way to bring a one-to-one pharmacist experience onto your website. Whether you recommend a product, answer a couple of questions about stock levels or provide a few health tips, you can use each interaction as an opportunity to show how available, knowledgeable and helpful you are.

Even if you don’t yet sell via your website, you can still give personalized advice and invite customers to come into your store.

Remember: There are some regulations around the type of advice you can provide online, so be sure to check these out first.

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How can I create a Patient Centric Business Model? My Partners

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3 GET AN OFF-THE-SHELF E-COMMERCE SOLUTION Launching straight into full-on e-commerce from scratch is a big step and it’s actually unnecessary to do it all once. Build a really great informational site first then dip your toe into e-commerce with an offthe-shelf e-commerce engine like Shopify. For a few dollars, Shopify allows you to put a few retail items on your website. All of a sudden you have an online store! This is a fairly low-key, low-investment path into your e-commerce career though you’ll still have a little work to do on fulfilment plus you’ll have to manage the money and any queries or returns coming in.

4 “MOBILE TECH IS A GIMMICK NOT A BUSINESS BENEFIT” Regulations state that prescriptions must be dispensed through a physical pharmacy but that doesn’t mean they can’t be ordered online and picked up in-store at a

customers to book in-store health service appointments. This is a great example of how digital and physical channels can be married together very well.

convenient time. That still gives you an opportunity to give customers

Remember: Make sure you

Remember: This will take

additional healthcare advice and

have the resource and capacity to manage daily inquiries and orders coming off your e-commerce site.

Start small and scale up gradually.

maybe cross-sell to other relevant

some integration work and careful scheduled maintenance between your web channel and your day-today processes.

products at the same time. You could also use your website to allow

5 LINK YOUR WEBSITE TO YOUR FACEBOOK PAGE Facebook gives you something that you thought you could only get in-store: two-way communication. Social media often scares newbies away because they’re worried about negative feedback roaming the internet. But here’s the thing: it’s much better to know what people are saying about you online so you can respond in a positive, educational and structured manner. Not only do you come across as a modern, listening, switched-on business, you might actually get feedback

that improves your business. Plus, positive word of mouth on social media is one of the most effective marketing methods you can get. And it’s free!

Remember: Build your Likes and followers on Facebook by keeping your page fresh and rich with up-todate interesting content. Take at least 15 minutes a day to post, respond and interact.

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Transpharmation Magazine / Issue 2

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IT SYSTEMS

HOW CAN I LEVERAGE SMART TECHNOLOGY IN MY BUSINESS? Scale and Grow

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How can I leverage Smart Technology in my business? IT Systems

Big Data Now:

STREAMLINE YOUR SUPPLY CHAIN

IS BIG DATA THE STUFF OF SCI-FI? If there’s a buzzword that sounds big-budget, grand-scale, outta my league, then Big Data is it. But not so, says Mike de Gama, CEO of NostraData. Small pharmacies can use data to understand performance and drive profits.

Here’s how to make a start…

Big Data is an awfully simple phrase for something that belies two quite complex ideas: collaboration and integration.

These are much harder to do in pharmacy than any other retail category. In grocery for example, where conglomerate and national chains are the norm, you can achieve huge economies of scale, pull together resources and get to grips with a lot of fast-moving data. But in pharmacy, where most businesses are independently owned, everyone pretty much does their own thing in. No economies of scale, data volumes are lower and budgets are smaller: it’s much harder to use data to drive performance.

The good news though, is that our data is still a huge asset. The challenge is that it’s mainly sitting in silos and disparate systems that don’t talk to each other.

The trick is – and certainly our aim at NostraData – to help pharmacy owners bring it all together, make sense of it and get a really clear view of how their pharmacy is performing – without having to comb through countless sets of figures.

So here are a couple of things you could do with big data now, and a couple of thoughts for the (not-so-distant) future.

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Excess inventory costs pharmacies money. Inadequate stock basically means you’re losing sales. Stock management is something pharmacy teams sweat over for hours and still get wrong. The problem is, the pharmacy reacts to demand, the wholesaler tries to anticipate that demand but has no visibility of it, so they take their best guess. The manufacturer has no visibility of the store or the wholesaler’s ordering patterns and is trying to anticipate what they need to stock. So you end up with inadequate or unnecessary levels of inventory right through the supply chain.

One of the experiments we’re running at the moment with one client is a buying model using predictive analytics. We take the buying history of the pharmacy over the last three years and then predict what they’re going to sell this year. This should ensure that the pharmacy has what they need, when they need it, it gives the heads-up to the wholesaler what the demand

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is most likely to be over the next six months (which is far more foresight than they’ve had before) and it brings costs down for everybody.

Overall it means we should start to see a far more efficient supply chain.

Over time, this visibility could also improve those dreadful non-conversations you have with suppliers. Rather than the typical transactional rep visit (where they do a long stock count because your POS data wasn’t accurate enough and then squeeze in five minutes at the end to ask you how it’s going and show you a couple of promotions: “Do want this, do you want this, do you want that, we’ve got this…”) you get a more value-add, collaborative business conversation: “Look, I’m not here to count your stock, I’m actually here to help you maximise the efficiency of our range” or “Look, there is no point stocking that line, even if I’m on an incentive, because I know it’s not going to sell in this area.” “So, how can I help leverage this item in your store?”

Big Data Now:

MANAGE YOUR INVENTORY We’re working with pharmacies at the moment who are using their information to determine whether they’ve got the right inventory range and whether they’ve right-sized that range. Managing their inventory through their POS we’re linking it back to their loyalty information to determine whether or not that patients are actually buying the whole balance of products that are available. We compare that to other stores via basket analysis to see if they’re missing any products that customers in other areas are buying.

These kinds of simple gap and

needs analysis can really show you what customers want to buy, rather than what you want to sell to them.

The ability to understand and meet patients’ needs is central to the pharmacist’s role. It’s less about dispensing medicine and more about a deep knowledge. We have got to leverage the anecdotal wisdom that many pharmacists hold in their heads and make patient understanding as systematic, consistent and automated as possible. Data-driven inventory management is one of the first steps to getting and keeping the ‘ear of the community’.

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How can I leverage Smart Technology in my business? IT Systems

Big Data Future:

Big Data Future:

PATIENT RECOGNITION AND PERSONALISATION I believe, in future, the ‘ear of the community’ is really going to come from data. Pharmacists who work big data into their business really own the future in terms of meeting patients’ needs. You can understand customers almost as well as they understand themselves from a health perspective.

We’ve seen real life examples in US retail of customers carrying a gold card and being recognized

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(by Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or RFID technology) as they walk in.

Staff can glance at a very basic profile of the customer, nothing too intrusive, but enough to address their needs proactively and quickly. If they’re in a hurry, you can help them quicker, if they’re not, you’re ready to offer a more consultative approach.

Big data can help pharmacies individualise patient care but on a mass scale.

PREVENTATIVE HEALTHCARE Going even further into the future, with wearable technology such as Fit Bit. Imagine customers sharing that information with their local pharmacy.

You can detect early changes in that person’s health and address it proactively, rather than waiting until the symptoms become apparent.

“Look you’ve got all the markers of pre-diabetes. There are things we can do right now to reduce your risk of developing the disease.” I believe big data can give pharmacies an important role to play in preventative care. Who else has that level of trust right now?

BIG DATA BIG LOVE A lot of pharmacy owners and pharmacists are questioning their future in the industry. I say make an informed choice. It’s not about the technology, it’s not about the data; it’s about what you want your pharmacy to do.

Data gives you the opportunity to aim higher and play a bigger game. In this industry, tough changes are a permanent feature.

If you’re armed with automation technology and data, at least it’s a fair fight.

You all became pharmacists because you wanted to help people. So hell yes, let’s automate 26

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those mundane and repetitive tasks so you can do exactly that!

Let the machines make you more efficient at dispensing product.

Let the machines take care of the manual processes, grab stock, put it away, order some more and so on. I don’t see a time when machines will replicate the genuine feeling of love you have for your patients, your ability to express it to them and just make people feel genuinely cared for.

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Big data? Bring it on.

Big love? Leave that to the professionals.

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MOBILITY

HOW CAN I LEVERAGE SMART TECHNOLOGY IN MY BUSINESS? Anywhere, Anytime...

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MOBILE MEDICATION MANAGEMENT: WHY, HOW AND WHEN? MedAdvisor’s Managing Director, Josh Swinnerton gives readers a quick tutorial on the How’s, Why’s and Wherefore’s of pharmacy-supported mobile medication management.

WHY IS MOBILE MEDICATION MANAGEMENT AN ESSENTIAL SERVICE FOR PHARMACISTS? We have an ageing population. The

pharmacies; they value their freedom,

medical profession is keeping us all alive

independence and mobility. To empower

and kicking for much longer. More people

patients and their carers, medication

are managing serious diseases and

management services need to be simple,

conditions for decades – with increasingly

reliable, flexible and accessible remotely

complex combinations of medication.

via web and mobile devices. My mum is a

The consequences for patients making

great example. She suffers from a couple

mistakes with doses and timings can be

of nasty chronic illnesses and she’s been

fatal. Medication management is a way for

taking at least 10 prescription medications

pharmacies to reduce stress and worry for

for several years. I used to see her run out

patients while they’re not in-store and a

of pills at all times of day and night, forget

great way to build customer loyalty.

to fill scripts at the right time, struggle

We’re not ageing gracefully. Senior

to remember which tablets to take and

citizens are not all tied to their homes

when. I just kept thinking ‘there has to be

and they’re certainly not tied to our

a better way’.

Technology will never replace personalised guidance from a health professional, but most of the time patients are on their own. Pharmacists and doctors can’t be there to help with simple but vital everyday tasks that ‘medication juggling’ involves. Email reminders tend to clog up inboxes. Besides most retired people don’t check their email on their PC often enough to make them timely reminders.

SMS reminders are good nudges but they don’t help patients learn wider selfmanagement habits. That’s why mobile apps like MedAdvisor for smartphones and tablets are a great long-term, patientempowering solution.

HOW EASY IS IT TO GET TO GRIPS WITH THE MOBILE TECHNOLOGY INVOLVED? The good news is that other industries have done all the thinking on this. They’ve gone through many of the development issues and teething problems, so that means we just pick up their learning and re-purpose it. Look at the Dominos Pizza app. You can custom-build a pizza anywhere, any time and keep tabs on it all the way from preparation, processing through to cooking and delivery. (They’ll probably add a digestion-tracker in there sometime soon). Look at some of the travel apps. You can build a world trip travel itinerary and book every stage of it in the palm of your hand. I think pharmacies could start to look and feel quite similar in the not-too-distant future.

The MedAdvisor app is equally simple and user-friendly. When you open it 28

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up, you see a list of all the prescription medication you’re taking at the moment and those you’ve taken within the last six months. You can see the quantities of each medication and how many repeats you’ve got left before you need to review it with your doctor. The app is heavily co-branded with your logo and contact information and so on. MedAdvisor encourages patients to leave their scripts on file with their favourite pharmacy and use the ‘tap-to-refill’ button. This allows patients to place their orders ahead of coming into the pharmacy; people are very attracted to this convenience feature.

If a pharmacy can sign up a patient to MedAdvisor, I think that’s pretty much a patient for life, unless they relocate or find a cure for their condition.

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How can I leverage Smart Technology in my business? Mobility

HOW DO PHARMACISTS GET STARTED WITH MEDADVISOR? You can talk to your patients about MedAdvisor and easily sign them up in-store. Bear in mind, you’re recommending something that’s totally free to the patient, and very relevant to what they’re there for – to fill a prescription – so it’s a pretty easy sell. If they don’t have a mobile device, Smartphone or tablet, you can reassure them that 95% of MedAdvisor is also available in a web browser. You can do sign-ups at any time in the pharmacy but the best time is when you’re taking in a script. Just ask: “Do you have a Smartphone or tablet? We can give you MedAdvisor, it’s a great little app – completely free of charge – that lets you manage all your medications”.

There’s a simple activation process; you can either help people through it or they can choose to do it at home. During the activation process MedAdvisor asks GuildCare to share the patient’s dispense record. The GuildCare activation code is the important bit: it ties the patient to the right records coming out of the dispense software and it ties them to your pharmacy. It allows the patient’s home screen to automatically update: new medications appear, numbers of repeats remaining appear (and update when you’ve just filled a script) date and supply of medications will appear (and increase if you’ve just filled the script).

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HOW DO I DEMONSTRATE PATIENT CARE IF MEDADVISOR IS DOING ALL THE WORK? Apps like these are just another way for you to show your care for patients.

In MedAdvisor reminders, alerts and prompts come in the form of animated character Pharmacist Phil; his face actually gets progressively more worried with each ignored reminder.

Phil is an effective user-friendly humanoid automated reminder that patients respond well to, but most pharmacists like to and follow up with patients who don’t refill within a certain time period and see this as part of their duty of care. Where Phil fails, a trusted pharmacist can step in. Between the two of you, you’ll have medication management covered.

If you pull up a patient record you’ll see a clear colour-coded list of their medications: red means the patient has run low or run out. You can see if the patient has ignored a couple of reminders and whether or not they’ve indicated they’re not taking the medicine anymore. If you think its advisable, you can manually trigger a personal message to chase your patient and invite them to come in and refill their medication. What better way to demonstrate how much you care? And what better way to reassure a patient?

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WHEN DO I GET STARTED? Now. Don’t wait for a magic breakthrough or world-changing development. We’re developing MedAdvisor all the time; once you’re with us you’ll get a great starting pack plus all our ongoing support, updates and training.

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Remember that your competitors are already offering this kind of functionality. It’s an all-rounder no-brainer: MedAdvisor enables your patients to manage their prescription medicines better and it helps you lock in some loyalty.

Simply click on the icon above

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How can I leverage Smart Technology in my business? Automation

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LITTLE MOVES, BIG RESULTS So you’ve made a sizeable investment in pharmacy automation and you’re beginning to see the benefits.

Smart move. But if you think you’re done, think again.

Robert Allen, CEO of Dose Innovations talks to us about the power of ‘one percenters’ – those smaller incremental changes that somehow yield the most significant results.

The good thing about the pharmacy business is that whatever demand we have now, unless something drastic happens, we can pretty much guarantee it’s going to rise. Our customers are only getting older, and as they do, their requirements are going to grow. So even if you’re using automation technology to meet current demand, if you want to remain customer-centric, you’ll need to keep scaling up with smart additions and enhancements as time progresses.

OBJECTIVES FIRST, AUTOMATION SECOND Technology works best when tied up with smart, efficient processes. So the first task is to decide what you want your pharmacy to achieve? What’s the next step in your business strategy?

Do you want more customers? I worked with a pharmacy in Brisbane that increased their DAAs from 120 to over 400 through automation. Do you want to free up a pharmacist? Another client used automation specifically to free up a pharmacist so they could go around to local bowling clubs and increase community engagement.

Sure, you can save time, and achieve some efficiencies by automation alone.

But if you really want to maximise your investment, and get the best from your automated pharmacy, then you need Back to Contents Page

CUSTOMER-CENTRICITY UTOPIA To me, a customer-centric utopia looks like this: a customer walks in, is greeted immediately, is able to engage freely and directly with a pharmacist, who quickly understands their requirements but is not in a rush to move on. The pharmacist is able to meet the customer’s requirements with the right product or service without walking away.

They also have time to follow up on previous advice or recommendations provided by asking the customer how they’ve been and how things worked out.

This gives the customer chance to raise related issues or buy other products and the pharmacist has a chance to provide a great

to design your pharmacy processes and workflows to complement your technology.Keen to attract new customers? Aiming to improve your wage percentage? Want to develop new professional services? Looking to grow your DAA business? Plan the processes then install the machines that will enable you to achieve your goals.

So where’s the 1%? What do I need to do? Draw a workflow map of all the activity streams and operational dependencies in your typical day, week or month. Which ones can be accelerated streamlined, de-duplicated or replaced by a machine?

healthcare experience. My utopia is free from physical barriers such as countertops, cash desks, crowds and queues. It’s free from other constraints like lack of time, staff shortage, low stock and poor data.

To create any aspect of this scenario, pharmacists need automation. The technology is not there to make your business look snazzy; it’s there to deliver this vision for you, your staff and your customers.

So where’s the 1%? What do I need to do? Visualise your utopia. What would your dream pharmacy look, feel, smell and sound like? Only choose technology that helps bring this picture to life.

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How can I leverage Smart Technology in my business? Automation

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TAKE A CHAINSAW TO YOUR COUNTERTOPS We’re the only health professionals that patients don’t need to book an appointment with. When it comes to accessibility, we should OWN it. Yet so many of us are still hiding behind a two and a half foot dispensary counter, with another front-shop counter in front of that.

These are growth barriers and they have no place in our future. When you look back to the community pharmacies of yesteryear, prior to brands and manufacturers, distribution channels and PBS, there were no counters. Give me one reason why a pharmacist needs to disappear behind a counter and I’ll show you a great piece of automation tech that squashes that need into the dust.

Go to an Apple store and you’ll see everyone standing on an equal footing. If we’re going to be

problem solvers and relationshipbuilders, a podium will only get in your way. Pharmacies that have made this layout change as part of a refit are really seeing the benefit with customer loyalty and feedback: “Wow, am I allowed to even get that close to the pharmacist?!” Automation can enable you to easily manage the change of removing counters.

So where’s the 1%? What do I need to do? If a total store refit is not yet on the cards (or in the budget) think of other ways to remove barriers between you and your patients. Can you set up a seating area where you talk to your patients? Can you position yourself on the customer-side of the counter?

THE SKY’S THE LIMIT So you’ve already hacked your counter to pieces? Good. You’ve focused your workflows on your objective? Great. I guarantee you still have some ‘one per centers’ in your business. Don’t put a limit on your imagination as to how much you can automate. Look at the new products out there. Take these for example: • V-Motion: It’s a life-size touchscreen TV that sits customer-side on the side of your Rowa. A virtual S2 and S3 shelf, the screens show all the same products as your standard S2/ S3 shelf, except the boxes are physically stored in your Rowa. Touching on the product image shows pricing or pack size options, and packs can be dispensed directly into the waiting chute . All your S2/ S3 stock can be managed automatically with the rest of your inventory, you no longer need to rotate boxes, stock take, or dust the

shelves, and you won’t need to go looking for items. You’ll save space, and will have the ability to customise your screens for seasonal promotions.

Best of all, the V-Motion facilitates that all–important contact with customers, since you never leave their side.

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Blister-automation: a unique machine with 200 cassettes where most have 40. That improves your packing speed and allows you to automate a wider range of products. It also takes a hi-res photo of the product as it goes into the blister, so it gives you photo recognition and verification of the packs. We call it teaching in to the machine. Manual blistering has error rates ranging from 0.4% to 14%. We’re improving on that significantly

• ROWA integration with De-blistering automation: this is what we’re working on. Keep a lookout!

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Automated stock ordering: I don’t know too many existing pharmacies that give enough space and area for receiving of stock and putting it away. Generally, you’ll see boxes lying all around the back of the pharmacy. Making those boxes disappear is great from a workplace health and safety point of view but also the pharmacy looks tidier.

So where’s the 1%? What do I need to do? Take a regular look at the new technologies coming out. Invite vendors to come and talk to you, bank the advice and gather ideas. Make technology business as usual; it’s an evolution, not a one-off.

So the important thing was obviously to plan and work out what benefits you need to tick off to ensure that you improve and prioritising them, so that you’re not trying to get stuck like the Three Stooges in the door, but you’re really focusing on the biggest areas that are going to impact your business straight away. And if we can commit to at least incrementally improving, we’ll have a better business every single year.

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Transpharmation Magazine / Issue 2

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