The Best Pharmacy Software to Help You Stay Competitive

Consumers prefer independent pharmacies because of their personal touch. They win on “courtesy, helpfulness, and speed of checkout and filling prescriptions, as well as pharmacists’ knowledge and accuracy,” according to Consumer Reports. In short, they can offer a tailored, customized service.

But the competition is steep. With profit margins declining, mega drugstores and health insurance companies merging, and Amazon entering the prescription drug market, independent pharmacies must be more efficient to stay competitive. This means, among other tactics, offering home delivery. 

OptimoRoute and other pharmacy software solutions can increase your efficiency, grow your revenue, and decrease your operating expenses.

In this article, we cover:

• What Is Pharmacy Software?
• How OptimoRoute Helps Pharmacies Improve Efficiency and Stay Competitive
• Other Pharmacy Software for Your Business
• Try OptimoRoute and Improve Your Delivery Efficiency at Low Pricing

What Is Pharmacy Software?

“Pharmacy software” is a general term for the collection of software used to run a retail pharmacy. Day-to-day operations rely on it for a variety of functions: point of sale, document management, barcode creation, e-prescribing, customer service, employee scheduling, medical claims and benefits, and more. 

OptimoRoute offers what more and more independent pharmacies need to stay competitive: routing and scheduling functionality to make home delivery possible.

How OptimoRoute Helps Pharmacies Improve Efficiency and Stay Competitive

OptimoRoute’s route management software helps pharmacy owners continue to fill prescriptions, build special relationships with customers, and contend with the likes of Amazon. Never considered delivering prescriptions to your customers before? Our software features help your pharmacy business every step of the way: 

• Automate deliveries, turning order spreadsheets into work schedules with a simple tool
• Plan deliveries according to workloads, and schedule up to five weeks in advance
• Stay in touch with drivers and send routes to their phones in real time with our Mobile app
• Track deliveries and get updated ETAs 
• Send Realtime Delivery Notifications to customer with emails and texts 
• Use Proof of Delivery options with image scanning to attach delivery photographs and customer signatures
• Schedule stops for reloading and estimate accurate timetables

OptimoRoute has helped independent pharmacies from the U.S. to the U.K. improve efficiency, reduce operating expenses, and compete against big chains.

When Sajid Khan’s U.K.-based pharmacy, BioMed Care Services, lost two of its six drivers, they were spending several days per week planning routes—and drivers ended up overlapping, anyway. With more efficient routes, BioMed Care Service cut its monthly operating expenses by £3,000 and increased deliveries by 25% with fewer drivers, and they brought incomplete orders and orders that had to be delivered again down to zero. 

Evolution Rx, a Houston-based pharmacy, started offering customers free home delivery to get ahead of its closest competitors. At first, pharmacy manager Frederick Lyons was manually planning deliveries each day—an incredibly time-consuming process. With OptimoRoute, he does it in ten minutes. They’ve managed to double deliveries while keeping costs down, which improved customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

Other Pharmacy Software for Your Business

These pharmacy management solutions can help streamline your pharmacy operations, too, beyond scheduling and routing.

Pharmacy management software

These tools automate workflows and reduce errors when dispensing your customers’ prescriptions, which improves patient safety. 

Micro Merchant Systems
Micro Merchant Systems helps with prescription processing, workflow management, claims processing, labeling and dispensing, report generation, automated refill management, and patient record management. Micro Merchant Systems provides computerized verification systems that lessen the risk of human error in dispensing drugs. They automate administrative processes, data backups, and reports—all of which frees pharmacy staff to concentrate on core processes. They even offer point-of-sale software for your POS system to make co-pay transactions seamless. 

Liberty Software
Automate prescription filling and manage your inventory with Liberty Software, which integrates with wholesalers’ systems. Their document management and dedicated point-of-sale software concentrates many of your pharmacy’s processes in one place. Plus, it reduces the amount of time your employees have to spend doing tasks that software can do just as easily. Workflows include final product checks and customizable stages. It also includes a compounding tool, advanced bin management, customizable prescription labels, and advanced reporting. 

Amplicare
A decision-automation platform designed by pharmacists, Amplicare identifies opportunities for healthcare providers to improve patient care. This pharmacy software syncs with most pharmacy management systems to act on new opportunities in existing workflows to increase your performance measures and decrease fees. Patients can compare plans and independent pharmacies can continue to communicate easily with customers, giving them the personal touch they’ve come to expect.

Inventory management software

A recent Consumer Reports survey found that 21% of consumers reported that a drug they needed was out of stock at their pharmacy. Inventory management software helps you keep the medications people need in stock, so you don’t risk losing business at your community pharmacy because your inventory levels are low.

Supplylogix
Supplylogix is a standalone inventory management tool designed for pharmacies. They use supply chain technology to help pharmacies gain insights into their inventory and manage assets across multiple locations. It’s useful for reducing human error and making inventory-related decisions using data. This pharmacy software specializes in inventory analytics and automating different parts of the inventory process to help you stay informed and agile. 

Customer relationship management software

Customers say they prefer independent pharmacies because of the service and relationships they develop with their community pharmacist over the mega chain that doesn’t know their name. With customer relationship management (CRM) software, you can provide even greater personalization to your customers.

Creatio
This CRM solution was specifically designed for businesses in the pharma and life sciences industries to automate business processes and improve customer experience. Creatio offers a customer database to track interactions, segmentation and targeting for marketing campaigns, and detailed account management. 

Customer service software

Ninety-six percent of consumers say customer service plays a big part in their customer loyalty. Your pharmacy needs to be ready to respond to customer questions or concerns via phone, email, or chat.

Zendesk
Zendesk’s ticketing system puts email, chat, social, and voice in the same place. Respond to customers’ questions wherever they’re most comfortable asking them—an essential service in a field where so much personal information is exchanged every day. Zendesk is not technically pharmacy software, but their key customer support features are important for pharmaceutical businesses; they offer omnichannel support and AI tools to help you respond to queries. 

Employee scheduling software

Make sure you have the right people scheduled at the right time to meet your customers’ needs with scheduling tools.

PayCor
Quickly make reliable, error-free work schedules you can edit any time with PayCor Scheduling. Create templates, assign shifts, and easily drag and drop shifts with only a few clicks. Reducing the amount of time you spend individually scheduling employees can easily add up to a difference of thousands of dollars in a year. You can automate the process, reduce miscommunication, and engage your employees by allowing them to take control over their own schedules. 

TSheets
TSheets combines time-tracking tools and scheduling software in one. It also has a mobile app that allows a great deal of flexibility for tracking, submitting, and approving times on both the employee’s side and the employer’s side. It’s useful in getting a comprehensive view of all projects in one place and generating reports so that you can tell how efficient your scheduling is. 

Try OptimoRoute and Improve Your Delivery Efficiency 

Pharmacies are in a more competitive market than ever before, and need to use software to stay viable. A pharmacy software system can help pharmacies supercharge customer loyalty, efficiency, and revenue generation.

Delivery is a must-have service for pharmacies, and OptimoRoute will help you offer delivery to your customers without adding costs. Sign up for a free trial and see how OptimoRoute can help your pharmacy increase profitability.