Managing a pharmacy is tough. You need to serve patients, review and interpret physicians’ orders, dispense drugs, monitor patients’ drug regimens, complete insurance forms, and bill insurance companies — not to mention the financial, sales, staffing, and marketing duties. These are things you and your staff deal with every day, and if you do all this by hand, management gets even more challenging and time-consuming.
Managing your pharmacy manually slows down your processes:
- Inventory doesn’t get updated in real time, you lack historical data, and you can’t generate reports. Plus, your inventory is difficult to analyze.
- Prescription preparation takes 40% of pharmacists’ working hours.
- Claims are often denied because of incorrect or missing information or billing errors.
- Documenting patient and payment records takes a big bite out of pharmacists’ schedules.
It’s 2020, and today all these challenges can be met by pharmacy management software. Let’s find out what such a system looks like and what it takes to develop one. You’ll also find out whether you require custom pharmacy management software development and when it’s better to go with a ready-made solution.
What is a pharmacy management system?
Before going any further, it’s important to understand what a pharmacy management system is and how it can help your pharmacy operate efficiently.
Pharmacy management software is a unified system that manages retail products and medications and automates operations such as stock control, drug dispensing, claims management, billing, and reporting. Such software provides pharmacies with a big picture of the business’s performance and a real-time overview of costs, revenue, and sales (at every location, if it’s a chain).
SOURCE: SUMITS-INFORMATICS.COM
What are the common modules and features of a pharmacy management system?
Usually, pharmacy management software is multipurpose and contains a number of different features. It’s reasonable to build such a system using a modular approach, grouping similar features into independent modules. For example, an inventory management module could contain features for uploading inventory, updating stock levels, and managing supplies, while a document management module could contain features for scanning, storing, and retrieving documents, including Certificates of Medical Necessity (CMN) forms, insurance cards, prescriptions, and workers’ compensation forms.
Each pharmacy needs its own set of pharmacy software features and modules. Your choice of functionality should depend on what you want to accomplish. Below, we outline features that can be helpful.
Inventory management
Inventory management is one of the greatest pain points for pharmacies. According to a resource paper of the Council on Credentialing in Pharmacy, pharmacists spend nearly one-fifth of the workday managing inventory. Paper-based inventory management is cumbersome and vulnerable to human errors. Plus, it requires plenty of time to design, track, and analyze paper-based processes. Pharmacy software that features inventory management, on the other hand, takes your inventory automatically and frees your staff’s time. Additionally, it allows pharmacies to keep up with customer demand and make data-driven decisions.
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