How can a digital platform make a pharmacy service more profitable?

It is widely accepted that pharmacy businesses can lessen budgetary pressures hitting the industry by automating/digitising and introducing private services. In order for a service to be profitable, you need to be able to make good revenue on a single patient visit (as you can with travel health), and you need it to be not time intensive to save on the cost of valuable pharmacist time. So how can a digital platform help with time-saving and how can you justify investing in a more expensive solution?

The up front costs of launching a service

If like most pharmacies you are already offering flu, the true cost of launching travel health will be the price of your travel platform and travel training. With Nuumad, the cost of travel training is ￡0, as customers get free access to the ECG Travel Training, or you can also use the free Neva training too (we also love it as it was developed by the same tech team as Nuumad ??).

The cost of digital platforms are between ￡700-￡1100, with Nuumad being at the higher end of this scale. So why would you chose a more expensive solution?

The hidden costs of cheaper solutions - time

With some providers, a consultation may take you up to 50 minutes as these platforms are often time consuming to use. In addition, if you are not using a platform real-time either (during your consultation), the time invested could take you another 30-40 minutes in order to input information from your consultation. This could add up to 1.5 hours spent on each patient visit.

What about Nuumad?

We offer a user friendly, quick and efficient solution you can use real-time during your consultation. With our platform, consultations take as little time as 15-20 minutes ??

Comparing the costs of time vs up front investment

To understand the burden of hidden costs, we used an example calculation of 10 consultations a week, using the average pharmacist salary of ￡24/h as the cost per hour. The results - Nuumad can save pharmacies over ￡14k a year ??

So is it worth closing a cheaper solution just to save ￡300 up front? We’ll let you decide.

And imagine what you could do with the time and money saved…

You could purchase another licence with Nuumad, train up another pharmacy colleague to run more consultations, kit out another small room to be a consultation area or even look to reinvest the same money into an automated dispensary. Alternatively, you could put that money into marketing, which would also help grow your business and bring you even more patients.

Any of these activities can help your pharmacy business thrive - and will help give your community more access to pharmacists as well.