Hi guys,
Just thought I might give some you guys some perspective from a pharmacist point of view. We use medadvisor in our group of pharmacies and we got our preferential allocation of shares.
1. A lot of people think that apps are for the young and since the majority of pharmacy prescription clientele being elderly, I was sceptical when we started 2 years ago on the pilot program. To our surprise, elderly patients also embraces technology, we have a very large group of members, predominantly over 50 years of age and also middle aged men and women caring for others and their dependants.
2. The best method for us to generate 'tap to refills' and sign ups was for each pharmacist create a dummy profile and use it to demonstrate the features to the clients, patients are always surprised at the amount of detail the app contains, eg. built in MIMs drug info, dosage reminders, carer mode, prescription history search etc. It takes our pharmacist roughly 5 minutes to sign up and briefly train the patient but once they are trained properly and play around with it, refill rates are great.
3. It streamlines our workload, majority of orders come across the platform overnight, and our workload first thing in the morning is already set, we do them in order and can pause and attend to other more urgent matters without seeing a patient sitting there waiting for a long time. Efficiency is improved this way.
4. Patients are able to 'snap and send' new prescriptions they just recently obtained from the doctors and we can dispense off these images and have the medication ready to go when the patient arrives, it gives us more time to look for interactions, prepare for counselling and advise the patient if something needs to be ordered in so they don't have to take a trip to the pharmacy to find that out. The only thing we need to do is to issue repeats and retain original when they arrive.
5. Patients can send text messages anytime to our pharmacist with regards to anything without having to call. One thing us pharmacists hate is the constant ringing of the phone when we're trying to serve patients present in the store.
6. Patients who travel and forget to bring any of their medications can find a local pharmacy, show them their prescription history on the phone and forward our contact details, we can then fax and post prescriptions to that pharmacy so the patient wouldn't be without their meds.
7. Membership increased when it became multi platform ios and android. Our nearby medical centres are now running the app advertising on their TV to generate more interest.
8. $100 per month is a small price to pay to maintain patient loyalty, generate more refills which means more money for the pharmacy, improve compliance and patient outcome, and it increases communication between pharmacists, doctors and patients. The app is fun to use and it gives patients a sense of control, responsibility and empowers them with knowledge about their medications and disease states.
We will continue to drive the program especially now that we are stakeholders
