Nowadays, it’s more complicated than ever to run a pharmacy. There’s so much to do on a daily basis:
- Verifying prescriptions
- Keeping track of your inventory
- Fulfilling orders
- And so much more
For that reason alone, pharmacies need a great workflow. So, What is Workflow?
Workflow is a systematic and organized sequence of activities or tasks that are performed by people, machines, or both to achieve a specific goal or outcome. It involves the coordination and management of resources, such as personnel, technology, and data, to ensure that the process is executed in a structured and efficient manner. That won’t just help the employees stay more productive and be more accurate when fulfilling orders; it also helps out your customers have a better experience.
But what great workflows could you implement in your pharmacy? Stay tuned to find out!
4 Key Benefits for Increasing Pharmacy Workflow Efficiencies
First, let’s outline some of the key benefits of implementing a pharmacy workflow. There are also many workflow examples. As mentioned before, the benefits are more than just for your employees, and here’s why:
Improved Productivity
Let’s get the most prominent part away: you and your team will find yourself being more productive. That’s for a couple of reasons, but here are a few of them:
- Less thinking of a solution, more solving the problem – With a great workflow, your employees don’t need to think of a solution when a particular situation arises. Instead, they can just start solving the problem, as the steps are outlined in your workflow.
- Automated tasks – Every business has some repetitive tasks, and pharmacies are no exception. And thanks to workflow automation, most of them can be fully automatic, meaning you can set it, forget it, and focus on serving your customers.
And since your productivity has increased, it’s highly beneficial to your sales numbers. That’s because you’ll be able to serve more clients than otherwise.
Better Customer Service
As a by-product of you and your team’s productivity, you’ll be able to increase the satisfaction of your patients. That’s mainly for one reason – service speed.
Since you can give out their medicine quicker than ever before, they are more pleased with your service. Just think about it, would you like to wait long periods to get the medication you or your sick child needs?
Of course not!
Better Transparency
Every successful business needs to be as transparent as possible with its employees. Without it, your employees might waste their time on wrong things and perform worse than expected.
So to counter-act with that, you can use workflow diagrams and workflow management system. With it, they can get an understanding of:
- What they and others are responsible for
- What is happening in your pharmacy currently
- And what is going to happen next?
Increased Confidence in Patient Safety
Patient safety should be the number one thing any pharmacy should focus on. If you won’t, not only will your reputation sink, but you might get into legal trouble. So it’s best to make sure that all fulfilled orders are accurate.
However, confirming the prescriptions can be a very demanding task! So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that mistakes will still happen when an employee is tired.
So how do we eliminate this problem? Well, that’s by setting up an efficient workflow. With that, we can automate some of the order fulfillment steps and simplify the workflow process so that fewer mistakes will be made.
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4 Workflow Management Best Practices
Now that you understand how beneficial an efficient workflow is for your pharmacy, you might be scratching your head and asking: “What can I do to enjoy these benefits?”. Well, fortunately, there are multiple best practices available. Here are just four of them:
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#1 – Order fulfillment
Fulfilling your patient orders can be pretty stressful. Just think about the number of things you need to do before you can give medications to your customers:
- First, you’ve got to verify the prescription’s authenticity
- Then procuring the medicine
- And finally, you’ll have to make sure the drug is delivered on time.
Fortunately, there are multiple aspects that you can automate so that the fulfillment will become a breeze. That, in return, will save up some time to take on more orders and serve more clients.
#2 – Employee Management
The daily work in a pharmacy demands a lot from you. Additionally to serving customers, another massive task is employee management. It can take hours away from the needle movers of your work.
So instead, you can use a workflow management software program to make it easier and more time-effective. For example, you could automate onboarding and offboarding. While that saves a lot, that’s just scratching the surface.
You could also create a better communication channel, instead of tracking down your employees to give them some critical information. You could also manage employee-related data in a more organized and secure way.
#3 – Procurement and Purchase Order
Just imagine this scenario.
You’re fulfilling an order for your client, and then a problem arises. You don’t have the needed medication to complete the order. Now you’re forced to tell your customer that the medicine is out of stock. That’s not a great customer experience.
So to fight against that, we can use pharmacy workflows to eliminate this scenario. For example, you can create email alerts when a specific medication runs out. That will give you ample room to order more before it runs out quickly.
Additionally, you could manage suppliers and automatically issue new orders as well.
#4 – Color-Coded Prescriptions Pickup
And lastly, let’s talk about color-coded prescriptions pickup stations. These are extremely important to set up for any pharmacy. Without it, you might risk your patient safety as you or your team member might give out the wrong medication.
With this 5-color code, you’ll eliminate many of these issues. Each color means something. That helps you or your employees know in what order you need to give out the prescriptions and if they need to be handled more carefully.
#5 – Appointment-Based Pickup
One of the best things any pharmacy can do is make a workflow based on appointments. This way, the patient can pick up their prescription medications on the same date each month. And that is beneficial for everybody! Here are just a few benefits:
- Better patient outcomes – Since the client comes there on the same day, they won’t forget to get more medication. That could improve their health.
- Better business efficiencies – Since the patient visits your pharmacy on a specific day, you can prepare the medication ahead of time. That will increase your productivity.
P.S Whatever workflow you’re going to create, I suggest you do it with your employees. That way, you’ll be able to tell them why something is going to change and get some invaluable feedback.
Why is the Pharmacy Workflow so Important?
So as you can see, a pharmacy workflow is more than just a good thing to have – it’s a necessity. Not only does it increase the productivity of you and your team members, but it also helps you to increase your patient’s health. And as an added bonus, you can serve more patients than without it.
That’s the only way to stay competitive and offer better service nowadays. So if you’re interested in learning more about implementing an effective workflow, be sure to check out our 7-step guide to implementing efficient workflow.
