Most of us have probably been told at one time or another to view challenges not as problems or obstacles, but as opportunities. In today’s world, the healthcare industry is ripe with challenges just waiting to be transformed into opportunities.
At iA, we view pharmacy fulfillment solutions as a tool in the arsenal that can be critical to transforming challenges within the pharmacy space into opportunities to help pharmacists practice at the top of their license and provide patient care, while creating the potential for new revenue streams and improving pharmacist satisfaction.
Pharmacy fulfillment and the pharmacist
The pharmacy industry has been evolving rapidly over the past several decades, enabling pharmacy providers to increase the services they provide to the patients in their communities. The pandemic only served to highlight the ways pharmacists can better serve patients and communities in times of need, and pharmacists are now viewed as a critical component of the healthcare delivery system. From providing vaccines and testing, to dispensing and administering antibody products and antiviral medications, pharmacists stepped up to make a tremendous impact on patient care during a time when the healthcare system was stressed well beyond capacity.
Pharmacy technology has evolved dramatically over the past 20 years, now providing ways to remove barriers that stand between pharmacists and their ability to provide patient care. Years ago, technology providers partnered with customers, primarily focusing on adding technology to distribution end points at brick-and-mortar locations.
Early on the goals were simple—to increase the quality of manually filled prescriptions, reduce patient wait times and provide reliable workflows and tracking tools to clients.
During this emerging technology period, many pharmacists told stories of waking up in the middle of the night trying to remember if a particular prescription had been filled correctly. It was disheartening to see passionate professionals, so committed to their patients, continually stressed by the demands of their workload.
Over the years iA has collaborated with customers to review available options that could be coordinated by workflow software including in-store robotics, tabletop counting devices and barcode scanning. Once operational, the technology improved quality and reduced wait times, and pharmacies of all sizes incorporated iA’s pharmacy fulfillment solutions into the retail setting.
As time went on, the desire to adopt and expand pharmacy fulfillment automated solutions was also driven by a rise in the adoption of centralized services such as central fill facilities, and the emergence and growth of patient care services offered by pharmacies, especially as a result of the pandemic.
Pharmacy fulfillment and central fill
Central fill didn’t just emerge 20 years ago. It’s been a vital part of pharmacy operations for some time. However, benefits traditionally enabled by central fill were usually only realized by a small subset of pharmacies. Over the past decade, adoption of the central fill model has grown. Once a niche business model, it now fills a competitive need in the marketplace. The COVID-19 pandemic served as a further catalyst for pharmacy fulfillment adoption, with many pharmacies evaluating a centralized fulfillment model now that they better understand how its adoption will enable then to continue to evolve and adapt to the ever-changing marketplace.
Today’s pharmacy automation
This is pharmacy’s time to shine and at iA, we’re excited to show customers how we can help enable pharmacists to elevate their role as frontline healthcare providers.
Centralized pharmacy fulfillment can help to provide the time and free up operating capital needed to provide these services, while helping to alleviate some of the pharmacists’ workload and give them more time to provide patient care.