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The retail pharmacy market is rapidly changing, especially due to digitization. And also the Covid crisis has generated new patients’ expectations for their pharmacy. We have developed the Open Pharmacy concept with the goal to help pharmacists to respond to changing customer needs of a digital pharmacy and prepare their pharmacy for the future. The concept supports new technological development and support you to establish as a digital pharmacy. Get to know our Open Pharmacy!
The world is rapidly changing and so are everyone’s needs and behaviors. The result: we continuously strive towards achieving more in less time which has become increasingly possible within the last years – thanks to digitalization and automation solutions. Just start to think about your daily needs, such as grocery shopping or banking activities: everything is enabled via digital customer journeys. Those influences and changes in our everyday lives are challenging for operators and companies.
Especially the healthcare industry is required to adapt to the expanding digitalization. And within this sector it’s the pharmacies that need to lead the change! We developed the Open Pharmacy approach – a solution to prepare pharmacies for the future, open them up for modernization to become a digital pharmacy. Our method structure the current concept of pharmacies into four areas:
- Commercial area as the point-of-sales
- Point-of-care area for private consultations
- Back office as remote room
- Cloud for data connection for online services
You probably ask yourself what's behind these areas. By combining the four parts within your pharmacy you equip your business and yourself for the future. How? Here are the answers:
1. New consumers individual needs are revealed
Countless medications cross the pharmacy counters every day. On one hand, numerous customers in retail pharmacies are already aware of what they need. They are therefore expecting a fast and easy solution that is characterized by immediate product identification and self-sufficient purchase processing – similar to an online shopping experience.
On the other hand, an increasing number of customers expects a personalized consultation from their pharmacists as an valid and easy alternative to their local doctor.
Pharmacies are thus confronted with heterogeneous target groups. It is undoubtedly the most important thing to quickly match the appropriate medicine to a specific customer, regardless of whether a detailed medical consultation is necessary or not.
2. Improve your pharmacy concept with a service in front of the counter instead of behind the counter
A few years ago, only a few pharmacies were thinking about automating their storage and dispensing of medicines. Today it’s a common equipment of modern pharmacies. While various solutions for automatically managing fast- and slow-movers are today firmly established in the pharmacy market. Most of them are usually being installed ‘behind the counter’.
However, smart technology also increases safety and allows you to spend more time on customer care: Our Open Pharmacy concept, enables the relocation of the automated storage systems outside of the commercial space. Instead of taking up valuable retail space for storage, the robot is installed in a remote room (when available). This relocation makes up space for new healthcare services and specialty areas and therefore generates new, higher margin sales.
Beyond that, the traditional counter as a separation of patient and storage areas becomes obsolete. The free up space improves the pharmacy workflows, so the automation solution does not only increase the safety but also allows you to better response to new patients’ expectations.
3. Digitization accelerates workflows
In this context, digitization is not only changing patient’s behaviors and expectations but also the pharmacists themselves. In their private environment, pharmacists and their staff use devices and interfaces with a simple user experience. In a professional context in contrast, IT and workflow silos are run by complex and non-networked software infrastructure which often leads to redundant work steps and errors. Software providers develop new approaches for pharmacies that are both self-explanatory in operation and link data from different pharmacy areas in real time. New approaches not only accelerate the processes at the point of sales and enable the use of mobile devices instead of static computers, but also directly connect the inventory in the pharmacy with wholesalers.
Pharmacy owners therefore derive substantial benefit: sales, profitability and stock of medicines can always be monitored, even from outside the pharmacy; promotions and reorders can be analyzed and controlled directly from the single-touchpoint software.
Your benefits of an Open Pharmacy:
- More time for consultation
- We support you by shaping our idea to your specific needs
- You as a pharmacy stay competitive
To sum it up: the Open Pharmacy concept offers you numerous options to prepare you for the future become a digital pharmacy and it allows you to spend more time on customer advices. Since every pharmacy has individual needs (interior, unique staff, etc.), we work together with strong partners in order to perfectly customize our automated solutions for your individual pharmacy environment. Are you ready to take your business to the top with us?
Open up. For the future of Pharmacies.
