In this era of on-demand delivery, the role of technology in enhancing pharmaceutical services has never been more important. Patients no longer want to go to drug stores to get prescriptions. Instead, they have demonstrated that, like other commodities, they want their prescriptions delivered to their doorstep.
As the world embraces a digital future, pharmacy delivery software has become a game-changer in prescription delivery worldwide, enhancing accessibility and streamlining medication delivery. Home delivery for prescriptions is convenient for patients, but costly for your business. Hence, you need to consider the best last-mile pharmacy delivery software.
Challenges of Pharmaceutical Deliveries
Like other industries, healthcare institutions and pharmaceutical companies aim to improve prescription delivery and reduce costs. However, getting prescriptions to patients in time can be a real challenge.
Major drawbacks that pharmacy delivery providers face include:
1. In-Person Trust Factor
Trust is a critical element in prescription deliveries due to their sensitivity. A 2021 study by Public Polling Policy showed that 85% of the adult respondents preferred visiting local medical stores for prescriptions. Around 36% of the people noted that local pharmacists knew them better than pharmacy delivery providers, while 15% had doubts about delivery service providers and feared their prescriptions could be damaged, lost or stolen.
This shows that to compete with local pharmacists, pharmacy delivery companies must effectively improve their customer experience, enhancing transparency and trust in their services.
2. Delivery Delays
Postal delays are one of the most essential issues experienced by pharmacy delivery providers. All delivery services experience unprecedented challenges when trying to get their items to their final destinations in time.
Causes of delays in prescription delivery may include:
- Staff sickness
- Poor weather conditions
- Traffic
- Accidents
Delivery delays are usually the most disadvantageous to pharmaceutical logistics, since they can’t be pre-planned. Further, delays in emergency medical prescriptions may worsen patients’ health or lead to death.
3. Wrong Order Allocation
Making sure you deliver the right medication to the right patients can be difficult, especially with the multiple steps in the supply chain. As supply chains increase, the chances of a wrong order increase significantly. In addition, when delivering to many patients with multiple medications, ensuring the right dosage for each prescription may be challenging.
To avoid this challenge, checks must be put in place at each step of the supply chain, which may further impact delivery time.
4. Disintegrated Supply Chain
The pharmaceutical supply chain is a multistep process involving many players. At least five major steps are involved before patients receive prescription medications.
- Manufacturing
- Wholesale distribution
- Stocking at pharmacies
- Price negotiation
- Delivery to patients
Any disturbance in the supply chain can lead to negative customer experience. As a result, multiple delivery providers are investing in last-mile pharmacy delivery software.
5. Security and Compliance
Ensuring medications are safely handled according to compliance is a substantial challenge for most pharmacists. For instance, high-value and restricted medications can be a target for theft or abuse. Reducing cases of loss and theft may require additional costs on security for your prescription delivery services — failure to which your business may be prosecuted for failure of compliance with stocking and transportation compliance.
How Technology Can Help
Finding effective solutions to common pharmaceutical delivery challenges doesn’t have to be difficult. Various strategies, including implementing technological solutions for more effective recording and operational optimization, can help.
The best thing about technological solutions is that they are easy to use for pharmacists and patients, and they are cost-effective compared to conventional systems. With efficiency and convenience for patients, plus cost savings for your business, technological solutions such as pharmacy delivery software allow you to enhance the accessibility of medical prescriptions to everyone.
Breaking It Down
- Data & Compliance: Digital technology can enable the centralization of pharmaceutical companies’ data analytics, processes, and workflow. Establishing a centralized data source can enhance your company’s compliance with medication regulation while improving process monitoring.
- Robotics: Leveraging advanced technologies, such as robotics and automation, can reduce challenges associated with the supply chain. For example, leveraging robotics in micro-fulfillment can be essential in prescription filling.
- Error Reduction: Preventing prescription medication errors, such as the wrong dosage or order, is a priority for any pharmaceutical delivery provider. Although errors can occur at different stages in the supply chain, leveraging technological solutions fitted with auto-population algorithms can improve safety features while saving time in logistics.
- Sustainability: Technology can also help pharmaceutical delivery providers enhance sustainability through innovative packaging in biodegradable and reusable containers. Moreover, implementing advanced logistics in the supply chain can effectively reduce environmental footprints during transportation.
Top 8 Features You Need For Pharmacy Deliveries
With the advent of pharmacy delivery software, many patients globally receive prescribed medication at their doorsteps. A single click of a button or a tap on their smartphone is all they need to obtain their medications in the comfort of their homes.
The efficiency and reliability of your medication delivery system are crucial to patients’ well-being. With each delivery, you have the potential to save a life, making timeliness, safety, and precision in delivery vital to your company’s operations.
However, to effectively deliver prescription medication to patients who cannot visit a pharmacy in person, your pharmacy delivery software must have the following features:
1. Real-Time Visibility
Real-time visibility into the status and location of each delivery is a game-changer in pharmaceutical deliveries. Real-time tracking allows pharmaceutical managers to monitor deliveries as they occur, ensuring all deliveries are in the right direction and schedule.
Medical delays can have severe implications for patients’ health. Delivery software with real-time tracking allows not only the pharmacy but also care providers and patients to track the transportation of medication in real time, estimating the exact time of delivery.
Tracking features in pharmacy deliveries are crucial to ensuring timely delivery and enhancing the security of the products while in transit. By knowing exactly where the medications are during transit, you can ensure the security and integrity of the supplies. In unprecedented delays, providing intervention can be easy, avoiding potential health effects on patients.
2. Multi-Location Support
The healthcare industry is broad and requires effective coordination among diverse facilities and personnel. Without the right technological tools, coordinating with patients and care providers in packaging and delivering medical prescriptions can be difficult.
Multi-location support can promote efficiency in pharmacy delivery. These features enable couriers to implement and meet delivery needs across diverse locations. This is key to ensuring that patients receive medications on time. In addition, having a multi-location support feature in your company enables an extensive care network where you can coordinate with pharmacists in delivering prescribed medication to patients in your whole market segment. The feature also allows the coordination of deliveries in ways that optimize efficiency and minimize delays.
3. Route Optimization
The route optimization algorithm in your delivery software guides couriers in taking the shortest and most efficient route to patients’ destinations. Route optimization tools come in handy in emergency deliveries, where every minute can make a difference in a patient’s life–This is the primary reason route optimization is strongly encouraged in a pharmacy delivery system.
Besides, route optimization can improve customer satisfaction, promote return purchasing and increase company revenue. Moreover, when you take the shortest route, you reduce vehicle fuel consumption, mileage and environmental footprint. Consequently, you save on cost while enhancing environmental sustainability.
4. Rule Setting Functionality
A customization feature can improve your pharmacy deliveries. With the current diversity of medical deliveries, customized features can help your company avoid confusion and delays. Customization through rule-setting features in pharmacy delivery software outlines guidelines for each delivery, specifying the unique requirements of each medical supply.
This could include customized notes for temperature-sensitive drugs to alert the couriers to observe drug-specific requirements throughout the process. Rule-setting functionality in the pharmacy delivery software is essential in maintaining and preserving the quality of medications throughout the journey.
Customization offers more than just convenience for patients; it also helps in predicting potential challenges for each medication delivery. By anticipating these issues, it’s easier to put preventive measures in place, making the delivery process smoother and more efficient.
5. Integration and Adaptability
An effective delivery software must seamlessly integrate with pharmaceutical companies’ existing order management systems. The delivery software must also sync with pharmacy and hospital databases to improve the supply chain. Such a feature is essential so when a care provider changes medications for a particular patient, and the new information is updated throughout all their systems to prevent discrepancies and confusion.
Integration is essential in storing data and ensuring that everyone in the supply chain can see the changes required before authorizing deliveries. For instance, when a physician changes prescriptions, the pharmacist and patient can view the updated information in real time, minimizing inconveniences in deliveries.
Adaptable software reduces your company’s need to change the existing systems before implementing new software. It enhances customer experience and ensures accuracy, timeliness, and safety when delivering prescription medicine.
6. Compliance and Documentation
Effective pharmacy delivery software needs to have features that allow compliance with the necessary regulatory requirements of the healthcare industry.
This means that your software needs features for maintaining and displaying delivery records for easy auditing and quality control. Software that automates the documentation process reduces human error, ensuring that every delivery can be traced and accountability assigned.
Compliance in pharmacy delivery goes beyond authority paperwork. Your pharmacy delivery software must portray the implemented safety standards in packaging, handling and delivering prescribed medication to patients.
This safety feature is crucial in transporting and delivering restricted and highly sensitive drugs, where any deviation can compromise patients’ health. It is also essential to reduce legal penalties against your company.
7. Ease of Use
The primary target for pharmacy deliveries are patients who cannot visit the pharmacy in person. Some patients ordering prescriptions may be in critical conditions, hindering them from understanding complex medical terms or having the time to navigate the lengthy ordering process.
Pharmacy deliveries must include easy-to-use features that allow patients to order and track prescriptions without complications. Interactive features, including voice elements and a short ordering process, can improve patient interaction with your delivery systems.
An easy-to-use pharmacy delivery system improves customer experience and satisfaction. This allows patients to interact more with your pharmacy delivery when requiring medication. Consequently, you get return customers, increasing sales and revenues.
8. Online Chat
Real-time communication is critical in the delivery of medical prescriptions. Critically ill patients and the elderly may find it difficult to search for specific prescriptions in your pharmacy database.
Including a support team on your app to help patients make orders and provide further medication information can reduce inconveniences and wrong medication. In addition, having a support team is essential in determining whether a patient needs a physician’s attention before disbursing a delivery.
Why Elite EXTRA is a Trusted Solution for Delivery Management
With the increased popularity of delivery services in the healthcare industry, many companies now provide software delivery services. However, it is not easy to find trusted delivery software suitable for pharmaceutical deliveries.
At Elite EXTRA, we treat our customers the way we want to be treated. Like any company, we make an effort to turn problems into solutions and seek constant improvement in fast, easy-to-use and innovative software solutions. When you’re working with sensitive data like in the medical industry, it is important you work with providers you can trust.
Beyond trust, it’s crucial to have software that delivers exceptional performance and meets your specific needs. Our flagship delivery software, Routing & Dispatch, has been optimizing logistics operations for thousands of clients since 2008. What sets our product apart is its adaptability; with a wide array of features and tools, you can tailor the software to match your unique requirements. Its proven ability to optimize routes, provide reliable driver tracking, and generate insightful business reports are compelling reasons to explore what our software has to offer.
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Improve Your Pharmacy Delivery With Elite EXTRA
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Sources
https://ncpa.org/sites/default/files/2021-03/mo-nationalpollresults3.pdf
https://pharmanewsintel.com/ news/fundamentals-of-the-pharmaceutical-supply-chain
https://www.researchgate.net/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ pmc/articles/PMC9579036
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/pharmacy-delivery-software-anna-john
