Helping more independents go beyond dispensing

Having transformed their own pharmacies from just about surviving on dispensing income to growing healthy service profits, Mark Pedder from HubRx talks about now sharing the secrets of their success.

Pharmacies are being constantly told that they must evolve. That they must change how they work. And that their future is in the delivery of more clinical services.

But often the most important part of these conversations is missed – the how.

How do pharmacies evolve? How do they change how they work? And how do they make clinical services their future?

It’s why this month we’ve launched something that’s been born out of the lessons we’ve learnt while transforming our own independent pharmacy chain.

 

From surviving to growing

Demand for dispensing just keeps growing, piling on the pressure and leaving little time for growth.

It’s a position we can empathise with. When we bought our own pharmacy chain, all 34 branches were so bogged down in dispensing that it made clinical service delivery near impossible.

But all the hard work of the branch teams wasn’t reflected in profit, team morale was low and valuable clinical expertise and skill was going to waste.

Things needed to change and central to our plan was introducing HubRx, our state-of-the-art automated dispensing hub to relieve the burden and stress that dispensing had created.

 

Rapid turnaround

In a few months branches were live with HubRx and sending prescriptions through their existing PMR system to the hub. With items arriving labelled, checked, bagged and ready for collection the next working day.

Something that had previously taken hours for branch teams, could happen in minutes.

We could quickly see that we were achieving more than just creating the capacity needed for our teams to deliver clinical services.

We were also generating buying efficiencies, reducing team stress and human dispensing errors, while gaining new patient consultations spaces that were previously housing stock.

 

 

Increasing clinical skill

On average 90 hours a week has been released in each branch by using HubRx.

Time that has meant branch teams can not only fully use their clinical skills they can also grow them through training. For example, accuracy checking technicians gaining skills so they can support new private clinical services such as blood testing and NHS vaccination programmes.

And investing in pharmacists so they can dedicate time to launching new travel clinics and capitalising on the boom in weight management services. While also supporting them to gain new qualifications and become independent prescribers.

Breaking service records

Across NHS care our branches are achieving impressive growth – a 2000% increase in contraceptive services, vaccinations up by 3000%, clinical pathways up by 5000%.

And private service income has grown exponentially with continual capacity-enabled introduction of new services.

The transformation across our pharmacy business has been considerable and it’s continuing to grow.

 

Boosted buying power

HubRx has enabled our pharmacies, and now our customers, to buy better too. Making savings that may have previously been out of reach for an independent achievable.

We’ve invested in the development of sophisticated AI-powered price analysis tools to ensure we track the market closely to buy at the right times.

Sharing the blueprint

So back to my earlier point – the how. How do other independent pharmacies achieve this?

While we’ve invested in making the process of using HubRx easy for pharmacies, we know that for some, turning the capacity it creates into clinical services profit can sometimes be daunting.

So, we’ve created the HubRx Clinical Services Support Package. It’s free for our customers and combines all our learning and experience, and resources we wished we’d had access to when we started our own pharmacy transformation.

 

Everything in one place

The HubRx Clinical Services Support Package includes access to a growing library of PGDs from Get Real Health – including vaccinations, weight management and women’s health, worth more than £1,200 per year, per branch.

We’ve curated step-by-step clinical services guides to make it easier to integrate new services, staff training documents and skills matrices.

There’s also a live chat feature to help pharmacists during patient consultations. And exclusive peer-to-peer communities - including a dedicated group for independent prescribers.

 

Going beyond dispensing

Transformation is different for each independent. For some it’s about reducing overheads andexpanding into more NHS services. For other it’s about going all out on private care. Whatever the end goal, the first step is creating capacity. And as the first UK automated dispensing hub designed solely for independent pharmacies, that’s what HubRx was created for.

HubRx has officially been named as a ‘MUST SEE’ exhibitor at The Pharmacy Show this year so make sure you plan a visit to stand C46.