Pharmacy software systems are required to operate a retail independent pharmacy within all 50 of the United States. There are some essential features every pharmacy needs to open and run their pharmacy such as prescription filling and label printing, inventory management, and logging patient history. But beyond the basics, what makes your pharmacy management software so important? The difference between the best pharmacy software on the market vs the alternatives can drastically change how your independent pharmacy operates on a day-to-day basis. A great pharmacy system can help you build medication adherence, stay engaged with your patients via multiple communication options, analyze patient profitability, and so much more! The best pharmacy software, such as Datascan’s Winpharm software, will provide you with all of the important features you need to run an efficient and profitable pharmacy.
The Basics
The core features in your pharmacy software system ensure you are compliant with the requirements to run your independent pharmacy. This includes prescription filling and label printing. Arguably one of the most used features in your pharmacy software, prescription filling, should be a seamless and easy process that enables you to fill prescriptions efficiently and quickly. Datascan’s Winpharm software offers a tremendous amount of custom options to design a prescription filling workflow that meets your pharmacy’s unique needs. You can set up pre-edit checks in the fill screen to analyze prescriptions before adjudication, looking for any potential data entry discrepancies, incorrect DAW codes, incorrect date written, and even mismatched dispensed quantities. After your claims have been adjudicated, your pharmacy system can even be set up to post-edit your claims, looking for any potential negative reimbursements, overpayments (indicating artificially low U&C pricing), and DIR fees. Even the most ‘basic’ features in retail pharmacy software such as filling prescriptions can be leveled up by designing a system that goes beyond user-friendly and offers customization and a series of checks and balances to help watch out for your patients’ health AND your bottom line at the same time.
Profit Analysis
One of the most important features of your pharmacy and POS software is the ability to analyze your business and profits. Through a series of custom reports and utilities, Datascan’s pharmacy system helps you determine your overall margins for patients, prescriptions, and drugs. Datascan’s patient profit picture is a unique tool that highlights each patient’s profitability for a 1 year period. Patient margins are broken down into 30, 60, and 90-day periods to determine the total number of prescriptions filled and both the dollar and percentage margins per period. Additionally, this one-of-a-kind utility considers margins on OTC products purchased at your point of sale. On top of that, you can analyze the profitability of linked family members as well. Both the pharmacy point-of-sale product and the pharmacy system share data to help accomplish this, and so much more. The best pharmacy software on the market can help analyze drug profitability through a series of custom reports and dashboards, show you an analysis of your OTC by product, category, or even subcategory, and help identify the top-producing doctors, top-selling drugs, and highest spending patients. By having an accurate overview of your inventory, you can help minimize spending on slow-moving products, determine which products should be special ordered, and which products are fast movers that should always be kept in stock. Your pharmacy inventory system should be able to look at past trends, and assist in making suggestions as to re-order points or inventory levels you should keep for particular drugs during different times of the year. Utilizing tools such as these that are built into our pharmacy software will undoubtedly help you build a more efficient community pharmacy, especially by eliminating waste on those shelves.
Patient Engagement
Staying connected with your patients is important and using the tools within your pharmacy system helps to streamline this process. The best pharmacy systems offer a variety of features to help you stay in touch with patients through text messaging, email, and mobile applications. In Datascan’s Winpharm software, patients can receive text messages, emails, and app notifications for things like refill reminders, ready-for-pickup alerts, delivery and shipment notifications, and even adherence reminders. Independent pharmacy owners can also rival their large chain competitors by offering a 2-way text chat, furthering their reach. You’ll be able to use these communication tools within your patient-facing mobile application or text your patients’ phones directly. This is another convenience your patients will thank you for.
Medication Adherence
An important function of pharmacy software is having tools that help build medication adherence and compliance. The top pharmacy software systems include analytic tools and features to manage maintenance medications and chronic conditions, as well as utilities to stay connected with patients to help them properly manage their medications. Datascan’s pharmacy system has an adherence dashboard that provides you with insight and performance analytics to determine how compliant patients are with their maintenance medications. The adherence dashboard looks at chronic conditions like hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and diabetes and analyzes how compliant patients are. This utility helps determine which patients could benefit from additional assistance and programs like automatic refills, delivery, and MedSync. The medication synchronization program assists the pharmacist in synchronizing maintenance medications so the patient can have one visit to the pharmacy or one delivery a month. This has proven to increase medication adherence which can help build star ratings, in turn building your reimbursements. Winpharm pharmacy software also has built in the ability to alert the pharmacist or tech filling maintenance meds when they are using the last fill, and has a utility that can scan through profiles and reach out to physicians for new prescriptions when those maintenance meds have no refills left. All of these tools can help monitor and build adherence, as well as build your refills and profits.
What Have We Learned?
It’s no surprise that pharmacy management software is not only important but essential in running your independent pharmacy. However, some of the most important features go beyond the basic core functionality and open up opportunities for bigger profits in your business. The best pharmacy software systems provide you with a variety of tools to build medication adherence and boost profits every single day.
Kevin Minassian is the President of Datascan Software. Under his leadership, the company rapidly expanded to provide pharmacy management software on a national level. Over the last 15+ years, he has ensured that Datascan has continuously evolved to offer innovative solutions for independent pharmacies while still offering world-class customer support. He is passionate about helping independent pharmacies to remain competitive, achieve success, and offer the very best service to their communities.
