Managing a pharmacy of a single store or a chain is challenging with many regulations, competing requirements, cash flow management, patient & document management, and increasing reliance on online Pharmacy Management Software.
To serve patients’ needs, a pharmacist must check the prescriptions by doctors and interpret them, assess the correct dosage, dispense drugs, and then regularly check patients’ drug regimens.
They also must keep impeccable records of drug & material inventory, cash memos & invoices, and ensure that all drugs – sold, in-store, returned, and expired – are accounted for accurately. Other key responsibilities of a pharmacy manager include managing staff, handling sales & returns, taking feedback & complaints from customers, planning for doorstep delivery of orders, and carrying out marketing.
To manage such a complex system manually with the help of registers and loose paper documents can be a nightmare, inefficient, and error-prone due to manual bookkeeping practices and human error.
The COVID-19 restrictions placed on the presence of all employees even at pharmacies and most of the people wanting doorstep delivery of their prescriptions have brought to the force the need for implementing a pharmacy management system for your pharmacy store or chain of pharmacies in the same or multiple cities.
Implementing a Pharmacy Management System (PMS) will also help you to add a new store to your chain, open a new pharmacy store chain, or revamp the present ones. With most of the work automated, documents digitized, and records easily & efficiently accessible, you will see that your burden is relieved & boost efficiency.
An efficient and well-designed PMS can help you streamline workflow within your store or chain, without compromising on the quality of service or skipping any of the important checks & details.
With enhanced efficiencies and cost savings, even with the same store, you can see a spike in revenue and overall profitability. With the stocks of medicines and other articles automatically ordered from the distributor or manufacturers, you will never lose sales due to shortages.
Prescriptions of patients will never get misplaced, doctors could send their prescriptions directly to you, and you could pull detailed reports whenever needed.
We are witnessing the emergence of the Pharmacy Management software market due to advancements in healthcare IT systems and increasing adoption of technology. The number of pharmacies is increasing around the world, which is fuelling market growth over time.
Here are some vital facts about the growth of the Pharmacy Management Software market:
A Pharmacy management system or PMS is a system to automate many processes, records, workflows, and billing needs of a pharmacy store or a chain of such stores.
The actual work of finding the needs of a patient and dispensing the medicine to them is still done by qualified pharmacists, but menial jobs like label printing, stock register maintenance, etc. are taken over by an online system.
This online PMS can store data and can be easily extended to add more sections or stores to a pharmacy chain. The system can allow the network doctors to send in their prescriptions directly to the store and alert the patients to pick up their medicines once they are ready.
An online Pharmacy Management System can allow easy integration of a pharmacy chain with an online store to let customers upload their prescriptions and get doorstep delivery of their orders.
Electronically sending orders to suppliers, billing details to insurance companies, and alerts to doctors & patients, all can be done by the PMS efficiently.
A fully integrated pharmacy management software will let you automate processes like inventory control, drug labeling & dispensing, record management, insurance claim management, cash & credit billing, payments management, staffing & payroll, taxes & utilities, and reporting on all aspects of the pharmacy store.
These systems are meant to be secure to meet regulatory requirements and the highest security standards of insurance and credit card companies. So, you can rest assured that your business data and your patient’s medical data will be always safe.
Pharmacy management software delivers much-needed transparency to the business processes of any pharmacy or hospital. It is a blessing for pharmacists as it enables them to manage the pharmacy function more efficiently and competently. A pharmacy management system can accurately predict your sales and profits, which ultimately improves your clientele.
Every aspect of a pharmaceutical business – manufacture, distribution, and sales – are governed by strict guidelines such as HIPAA compliant, FDA, DEA, etc. the PMS from Arka Softwares is easily customizable to meet the strict legal requirements from all major regulators and government agencies controlling the trade of drugs and medicines.
Our PMS also meets the standards set by many accreditation standards and regulators including:
These regulatory bodies require a pharmacy to send multiple reports in different formats and need direct access to your records.
The PMS design can produce the desired reports and records and let a limited set of authorized users access the system for external audits.
In addition to selling prescription medicines, a pharmacy store can sell many other related supplies and over-the-counter (OTC) medicines. Customers will come to visit your store if they can get all their requirements in one place.
A loyalty system can offer customers of your non-prescription articles an extra advantage in coming to your store, giving a boost to your sales. You can open the loyalty program for all customers and let all customers win redeemable loyalty points on their all purchases.
You may be a walk-in pharmacy store, or you may be a fulfillment center for an online pharmacy. You may be dealing with end customers directly or you may be dealing with other stores as a B2B business.
Whatever your business model, you can get to start an added line of related business if you have our PMS for pharmacy management.
Our strong foothold in the end-to-end value chain of pharmacy storage, distribution, and sales can benefit you enter any of the segments you are not present in now.
Like any other business, pharmacies also face many challenges. These roadblocks and challenges have transformed or grown bigger with the passing of time.
Most of these challenges are surmountable with proper guidance and help from the right people at the right time. The common challenges, which slow down the business growth, faced by pharmacy stores and chains include:
Most pharmacy chains either grow organically or inorganically. In any case, each store, to build its own identity, makes its own rules, workflow, and processes.
Also, when two stores or chains merge, to form a larger chain, they may have completely different work-culture, workflow, and processes.
Because of these inconsistent procedures, many errors, confusion, and anomalies may creep into the system. From time to time, people using the system may get confused about what course of action to follow in case of something new or unexpected.
Many doctors still scribble prescriptions on their letterhead, and even patients feel a sense of agency with such a document in their hands.
But we are aware of the illegible handwriting of far too many doctors, it can cause system delays or errors. If a pharmacist is unable to understand what the doctor has written, then she may contact the doctor’s office to get details, while the patient must wait for no fault of theirs.
Or, if the pharmacist is unable to contact the doctor, then she may fill the prescription anyway and increasing the chances of the error.
Paper-based prescriptions also make it difficult to refer to them after a long time and are prone to destruction by natural elements or human mistakes.
Manual billing can be the source of many errors – incorrect tax computations, incomplete entries, illegible names of the medicines, doctor, or patient, inefficient workflow, outdated inventory information, and even calculation mistakes that affect the bottom line.
Inventory management is not just about taking the stock of current medicines and supplies in the pharmacy. It also involves the decision-making process about which item to order when, in how much quantity, and from which supplier.
Inventory requires assessing the value of the supplied in stock or transit, for insurance purposes. Medicines require special attention as they can be expired if not sold timely to patients.
That could lead to either unsold stock with a loss of sales, or unsold stock due to greater purchase orders than needed.
Both cases result in avoidable losses and your working capital may get stuck in an item that does not sell fast instead of one that does. The discrepancy in finding medicine demand as per the past trends can cause overstocking or understocking.
Payments from clients and suppliers & staff affect the cash flow of all businesses. In the case of pharmacies, cash management and payments management are the more acute problem as monthly sales are mostly fixed but not the expenses. A lack of streamlined payment management systems with a proper online billing solution can create inefficiencies in cash flow.
Regulators routinely change how some medicines are to be dispensed. For example, they may start demanding savings on the prescription for certain medicines and may exempt some others.
The pandemic has also created certain shortages in pharmacies that required the regulators to step in for controlling the stock limits, sales limits, pricing, and prescription standards for many medicines and essential supplies.
All the above problems may have a single reason if we assume that the people are efficient, but the manual system is the bottleneck – lack of automation.
With an automated system to take care of prescriptions, document records management, patient management, billing, inventory, etc., pharmaceutical stores and chains can devote more time to serving the needs of the patients rather than handling paper.
Current pharmacy systems lack automation techniques and work with processes that are physically executed.
At Arka Softwares, we design pharmacy management Systems with your needs in mind and not our technical ability. Our PMS has modules to automate drug dispensing workflows, create patients’ master index, manage lists of approved medications & supplies, handle inventory, and process orders & claims.
Our PMS is fully compliant with all the regulatory needs with all reports demanded by regulators to help you in compliance management. Our analytics engine can give you insights into the trends of sales, patients’ behavior, and access to leading formulary databases like Lexicomp, RxNorm, First DataBank, Medi-Span, and the National Drug Code.
The right time to start something new and use something efficiently is always NOW. If you are already fed up with the inefficient, error-prone, and leaky system.
If your customers get irritated because of the long queues and frequent complaints of medicine shortages if your records, data, billing, and inventory management have gone out the window, then now is the right time for you.
As a pharmacist, you are very aware of the fact that timely medication and treatment can be a game-changer. Similarly, the all-in-one medicine for your all business ailments is a feature-rich PMS that caters to your needs and is user-friendly.
An efficient pharmacy management software can solve challenges such as:
A well-designed pharmacy management system must have some essential modules and may offer on-demand access to some optional modules.
Based on our vast experience in working with many pharmaceutical businesses of all sizes and business models, we can offer you the most comprehensive list of modules that are needed in a pharmacy management system.
The important ones are listed here, with their special features.
Inventory management for pharmacies is different from other businesses in that each article may have different storage emends, shelf life, and formulation, and many of them are simply raw materials for producing custom medicines.
A digital record of inventory can help improve your inventory turnover ratios by reducing the average number of days an item is in storage, before being sold or returned. Data-driven stock level, reorder level, reorder quantity, and identifying the items that have a faster turnover, are all its benefits.
Expired medicines and materials need safe and complete disposal that can be tracked easily via an integrated inventory management module. Stocktaking, physical verification, and stock audits are features of the module.
Many processes in a pharmacy can be automated fully or partially to free up valuable human resources for serving client requirements. Some of the processes that can be automated are:
Scheduled prescription automation with centralized patient details can make prescription processing efficient. You can make data-driven decisions related to drug selection, defining refill due dates & dosage, recording prescription filling schedules, and prescription pick-up details.
The number of incoming calls from patients to check if their medicines have been prepared will drop significantly as the new automated system can send them alerts over a mobile app, SMS, or email. Timely information to the insurance provider to charge your claim for medicines.
It will also optimize your deliveries and generate a larger volume of prescriptions.
Each pharmacy store generates tons of data and a lot of paperwork. All records need to be kept for a very long period, due to regulatory & legal needs.
With digital documents and the digitization of physical ones, you can save on a lot of paper and the associated problem of losing them.
Some features of the module are:
The inventory of a pharmacy is full of articles that are bout to expire. If you can find and return them in time, you can save a lot on the dead stock.
Similarly, some of your customers will return some products they bought and will expect a refund.
A Point-of-Sale (POS) machine at the checkout can help you manage billings and cash in the pharmacy store. An online pharmacy system must have an integrated payment gateway for secure checkouts and payments.
Every pharmacy is a trove of complex data related to patient’s medical records, prescriptions, medicines, formulations, and insurance details.
Data safety and privacy are paramount and therefore, they must follow federal and international rules governing data protection.
This data can be, however, used for analytics and data mining in addition to producing mundane reports. Actionable insights from the data can be used to your advantage in deciding strategies for patient care, service, and medicine orders, and forecasting the stock needs for the near future.
With proper analytics tools, you can avoid loss of sales due to shortages, reduce inventory handling costs, avoid dead stock in the form of expired medicines, and manage your workflow better.
Billing, payments, and accounts receivable are already complex in a regular business, but they acquire a new level in the pharmacy business. Pharmacy billing is heavily regulated by manufacturers, suppliers, warehouses, and retailers, everyone needs to keep detailed records of their movement, sale, and returns.
An automated system can not only help in daily transaction processing but also manage multiple payers for a bill, and insurance reimbursements, generate alerts for delayed payments, and produce a complete trail for the identification of cost & profit centers.
Pharmacies need to recognize referrals, get insurance authorization, do claims processing, generate remittance advice, help with benefits pay-outs, and carry out risk mitigation protocols.
With the COVID-19 pandemic scare and the convenience of ordering medicines from the convenience of your home, online pharmacy has become a rage among customers. With the digital transformation of your business, you must be prepared to handle online requests as easily as you would any walk-in request.
An integrated e-commerce module with shipment tracking and a reliable delivery mechanism can set you for good with many customers becoming regulars. A proper back office with a functional & appealing storefront is part of an online pharmacy store.
A PMS must generate different kinds of notifications and alerts for staff, managers, patients, and doctors, without compromising the safety of a patient’s privacy. The following are some areas where having a notification is important:
There are many ready-to-use PMS products available. You can download them from their respective websites by paying a one-time license fee or a monthly subscription based on the number of users. Off-the-shelf PMS software products are faster to set up if time is of the essence.
But, if you have some weeks till you must implement the software then, you have the choice to build custom software for your pharmacy store. The scope for customization is very limited in the case of a ready PMS product as the software is built for common needs.
It means you end up paying for features you will never use and still, you might miss some important modules you needed.
The solution to both the above problems is a build custom pharmacy management system that will cater to your needs. Too many updates to the ready-made solution would eventually expose it to data breach attacks.
Here we discuss the steps that you must take to help the development vendor design and create your custom solution to the specifications.
Clear, precise, and measurable business goals like tracking inventory, tracking prescription abuse, cost savings, and avoidance of frequent stock shortages are some goals that you may have in your mind.
The end-users, including your staff, doctors, and even regular customer of online pharmacies can offer maximum detail-oriented feedback.
Such participation by the end-users will get them invested, making the change management that much easier. Such interactions can bring to fore certain gaps that only a regular user of the systems can find and suggest ways to correct them.
Once the draft System requirements Specifications are designed by the team, you must thoroughly go through each of the modules and their functionality.
You can do it on your own or with your team. These observations and insights can be helpful in more than one way.
Starting an online or offline pharmacy app store requires tying up with multiple vendors to order your medicine supply. These are contracts that are enforceable by law.
Once you have signed off on the system design, you must start negotiating data migration. Most systems were manual until a few years ago and some data are partially digitized.
As soon as the system is developed, you will need data to test it as well as deploy the final version of the system. Therefore, data migration and loading are vital tasks that must be taken up in parallel using a simple MS Excel file.
The vendor must provide you with a pre-formatted file, where your data can go for direct upload.
A modern pharmacy management system needs to be ready for today and tomorrow with a multi-faceted approach. We believe for any workable solution the following components will be required:
With these options available, any pharmacy can easily scale its business operations, with minimal investments and complexities.
The Web storefront and mobile app can be made accessible to internal users, suppliers, and customers with user-specific features based on login sessions. These systems can help in all three – B2B, B2C, and B2B2C – models of pharmacy businesses.
As you have a comprehensive understanding of the need, importance, benefits, and challenges involved in pharmacy management software development, you can appreciate that it is not an easy task to pinpoint the price for such a complex system.
The cost to develop a scalable solution depends on the following factors:
The cost of the software can be calculated with a proxy by the cost of the technical man-hours devoted to developing the solution.
A team made up of a Project manager, mobile app developers, database & cloud engineers, UI/UX engineers, quality assurance & testing engineers, and data migration engineers will be devoted to the project. We expect they will need between 625 to 700 man-hours.
Now, taking into consideration the minimum, maximum, and average hourly rates in different geographies, we can come to an estimate of the costs:
| Geography | Hourly rate (USD) | USD Cost @ 625 hours with AR | USD Cost @ 700 hours with AR | ||
| Minimum | Maximum | Average (AR) | |||
| North America | 125 | 200 | 162.5 | 101,562.50 | 113,750.00 |
| Europe | 100 | 150 | 125 | 78,125.00 | 87,500.00 |
| Asia | 80 | 120 | 100 | 62,500.00 | 70,000.00 |
| India | 50 | 80 | 65 | 40,625.00 | 45,500.00 |
Any software system is as good as it is used and with the right inputs from your side, we are certain that the expert team of Arka Softwares can meet and exceed all your requirements.
We strive to deliver the right fit to match your needs for today while keeping enough scope in the system to handle the increased pressures of tomorrow.
With the 24×7 support, that team Arka Softwares can offer nothing can go wrong, and even if it does, then we can fix it in no time.
Then what are you waiting for, click the link below and fill in your query so that our pharmacy domain expert can connect with you and gather your requirements.
A pharmacy management system is used in pharmacies and hospitals, as it enables them to automate and streamline their pharmacy workflow. This system helps pharmacists and medical practitioners to verify and manage prescriptions in one go.
The cost of pharmacy software depends on the features, complexity, number of users required, and software-hardware constraints. A pharmacy software with basic features could cost you between $15,000 and $30,000. If you want full-fledged cloud-based pharmacy software, which can cater to multiple users and pharmacies, then the cost could be between $40,000 to $50,000.
Here we have the list of the most popular pharmacy software available in the market:
1. McKesson Operational Efficiency for Pharmacies
2. Cerner Retail Pharmacy
3. PrimeRx
4. Winpharm
5. DocuTrack
6. PioneerRX
7. NRx
Jeeto11
The app quickly earned over 1,000 downloads within two months of launch, and users have responded positively. ARKA Softwares boasted experienced resources who were happy to share their knowledge with the internal team.
Archithrones
While the development is ongoing, the client is pleased with the work thus far, which has met expectations. ARKA Softwares puts the needs of the client first, remaining open to feedback on their work. Their team is adaptable, responsive, and hard-working.
Service Provider
I started my project with Arka Softwares because it is a reputed company. And when I started working with them for my project, I found out that they have everything essential for my work. The app is still under development and but quite confident and it will turn out to be the best.
