Following a six-week trial in one branch of the Pharmacy group Dean and Smedley earlier this year, ProScript Connect from EMIS Health is now live in the East Midlands-based group’s remaining 10 branches.
Dispensing over 90,000 prescription items every month, Dean and Smedley pharmacists say the ability to process prescriptions quickly is already having a huge impact on efficiency and customer satisfaction. They are reporting time savings of up to 45 minutes per pharmacy staff member a day from just one of the upgrades they’ve implemented.
Ben Eaton, Procurement Manager and Pharmacist at Dean and Smedley said: “Having used ProScript for 10 years, we introduced ProScript Connect to improve our service and benefit from all of the extras that the software offers. It is so quick. Many of the functions are instant and the ability to switch from one task to another saves so much time that was previously spent waiting for records or pages to load. Because we can have multiple tabs open at a time, we can multitask and that is saving at least 30 minutes per branch every day.”
Dean and Smedley is also benefitting from additional upgrades including Prescription Tracker Service (PTS) and Constant Connect, a resilience service to protect against loss of N3 connectivity.
“PTS uses barcode technology to revolutionise the dispensing process. Ben explained: “Traditionally, we used to organise prescriptions on the shelf according to the patients’ surname. Whilst it seems the most obvious way, it was actually incredibly time consuming. You could have 200 prescriptions under the letter ‘S’. In all of our customer surveys, time waiting to collect a prescription was always where we received the worst feedback. Using barcode technology means not only do we know exactly where a dispensed item is, but we also instantly know it’s been processed and is ready. It’s saving on average 45 minutes per staff member per day. More importantly, our customers are getting their prescriptions much quicker. It has revolutionised the process.”
“Constant Connect has already protected us from loss of connectivity four times. That would have meant not having access to the Electronic Prescription Service, which is at least 70% of our workload. The branches did not even realise there had been a failure. There’s no impact on our efficiency – it’s business as usual.”
ProScript Connect is now live in 1150 pharmacies across the UK.
