Retail Pharmacy Management: A Must-Read Guide

Adequate retail pharmacy management is beneficial for owners. Retail pharmacy management ensures the employees get the right medication or proper dosage in a short amount of time; otherwise, it becomes hectic to store so many medicines easily and keep track of the stock. A pharmacy management system (PMS) is a very complex computer system designed to ensure any pharmacy department, whether in a hospital, retail store, or online eCommerce platform, can get everything they need.  

A pharmacist or pharmacy manager can determine how the medication is used in the pharmacy while also supervising drug dispensing with the use of this system. However, this is not the end of the benefits of PMS in healthcare; there are more. Read on to know more.

What Types of Pharmacies are in Retail?

These are some of the most common types of pharmacies in retail. 

• Community Pharmacy

Community pharmacies are the most common and well-renowned type of pharmacy. These pharmacies are also known as pharmacist or chemist shops. They are mostly commercial stores that provide the community with access to the medications they require. Community pharmacies also promote the safe and effective use of the provided medicines. They guide customers about how to take medication and its interactions with other products, such as alcohol, helping to avoid the troublesome side effects of medication.

• Hospital Pharmacy

Hospital pharmacies are usually placed within the hospital, such as a medical clinic or nursing home. Hospital pharmacists work closely with other health professionals, ensuring the medication regimen for each patient is optimized to achieve better outcomes. These pharmacies allocated a vast number of medications a day, including in wards and intensive care units (ICUs), following patients’ medication regimes.

• Clinical Pharmacy

Clinical pharmacies provide a direct healthcare service that optimizes the use of medication and promotes better health. These clinical pharmacists usually work with doctors, nurses, and other professionals to provide a detailed care plan for the patient. Clinical pharmacists are highly qualified, specifically in biomedical, pharmaceutical, social behavior, and clinical sciences.

• Industrial Pharmacy

Industrial pharmacies are places where researchers and designers research and design medicines. They are involved in the pharmaceutical industry and include research, manufacturing, packaging, quality control, marketing, and sales of goods. Industrial pharmacists sometimes work in manufacturing plants or around hazardous chemicals.

• Compounding Pharmacy

A compounding pharmacy involves the production and preparation of prescribed medicines by doctors. These pharmacists prepare medicines specific to patients with needs that can’t be available in the market. A compounding pharmacist works in a community, clinical, or residential-based setting based on the purpose of the drug formulation.

• Consulting Pharmacy

The consulting pharmacy is a new branch of pharmacy that focuses on reviewing and managing patients’ medication regimens rather than dispensing medicines. 

Consultant pharmacists usually work in institutional settings such as nursing homes or visit patients in their homes to offer services. They also advise healthcare and insurance provider companies on patient medication use.

 What is Retail Pharmacy Management?

Pharmacy management is the administration of all aspects of the pharmacy’s operation. It is a pillar in the functioning of an efficient, effective, and profitable pharmacy. Pharmacists can use it to improve the efficiency of their operations and boost their revenue through cost-cutting features and better patient care. To achieve these goals, pharmacies can benefit from adopting retail operation management software that offers essential features tailored to their needs. 

It includes several activities, such as:

• Centralized database for data storage
• Managing pharmacy staff
• Quality, availability, and use of medicines
• Dispensing of medication and prescription
• Handle stock and shop finance
• Automate tasks of maintaining bills
• Sales management modules
• Inventory management
• Compliance with standard regulations
• Maintaining customer relationships
• Implementing marketing strategies

Overall, pharmacy management is a user-friendly tool for pharmacy managers, helping to reduce workload and manage all the sections in the pharmacies. It automates all the crucial tasks, such as maintaining bills, data storage, fast searching, updating, and deleting medicines. Moreover, pharmacy management can analyze and generate reports on the list of medicines dispensed in the polyclinic for a given period.

What is Retail Pharmacy Inventory Management?

Retail pharmacy inventory management is an integral part of the pharmacy management system. Retail pharmacy inventory management is one of the biggest ongoing cost challenges in any pharmacy. 

Mismanagement of inventory levels can lead to huge financial losses if a pharmacy has an excess and unsold stock of medicines. The funds could have been used for other useful services. Moreover, not having sufficient products in stock can create a bad image of a pharmacy in customers’ minds, which can make them purchase medicines elsewhere.

Failing to sell items before their expiry, not being returned on time, or bringing uncollected repeat prescriptions back into stock can also be good examples of poor inventory management. You can now better understand how crucial inventory management is with all these examples. 

Proper management helps in enhancing cash flow, improving margins by minimizing waste, and offering better services. It monitors and controls medicines and dispenses them to ensure their quality. It’s also crucial in minimizing expired drugs and availability for a significant amount of patients’ satisfaction.

However, all modern pharmacies nowadays incorporate a pharmacy management system (PMR) to manage dispensing. Some retail operation management software systems also integrate inventory management, automate tracking stock checks, and place orders for needed medications.

Benefits of Pharmacy Inventory Management 

These are some key benefits of pharmacy inventory management:

• Monitoring Stock Levels

Modern pharmacy management systems have revolutionized inventory control, making it more efficient and accurate. They can easily integrate with your electronic point-of-sale (ePOS) systems to automatically update stock levels as items are sold. They will also provide you with a real-time view of your inventory levels, helping you optimize them.

• Avoid Overstocking and Understocking

Effective inventory management helps pharmacies avoid both overstocking and understocking. Overstocking occurs when pharmacists order more stock than they can sell. This racks up their stock storage costs and can lead to expired or ‘dead’ stock medications. 

However, understocking refers to insufficient stock levels to meet the current or near-future demand of their customers, resulting in unfulfilled prescriptions and customer loss. 

Incorporating decent pharmacy software enables you to quickly analyze sales trends and rates, helping you optimize your future stock according to demand. This software also notifies you of uncontrolled repeat prescriptions, enabling you to return these items to the inventory before their expiration.

• Lot Tracking

Another feature of inventory management in pharmacies is lot tracking. Don’t you think that you can easily remove some expired or flawed medicines from inventory if you can quickly identify and segment specific batches of medicines? 

You can do this by using barcode scanners integrated with pharmacy software. It will speed up the entire process by instantly locating specific batches of medicine. Lot tracking also helps you to remove expired or recalled items and practice first-in, first-out dispensing to minimize waste.

 High-risk Medicine Management

For high-risk medicines—those that are expensive, in low demand, or have a short shelf life—the PMR software can flag these items. It will allow pharmacies to use just-in-time ordering to coordinate with customer needs without keeping large stocks on hand.

• Spotting Shrinkage

Modern pharmacy software helps in detecting shrinkage more quickly than traditional manual stocktakes. Unusual discrepancies between recorded and actual stock levels can be identified promptly, allowing for a swift investigation of potential issues like incorrect checkout procedures or theft.

• Automated Processes

An ideal pharmacy inventory management system relies more on automation. While not all pharmacies can invest in dispensing robots, many use software to automate administrative tasks, ordering, and delivering processes. 

systems can automatically record items when stocks run low, while integrated POS systems update stock levels in real-time.

Why You Need Pharmacy Management Software

A pharmacy management system is a digital tool used to automate the pharmacy workflow. It automates the following day-to-day tasks. 

• Reviewing physician orders
• Preparing medications
• Controlling the inventory
• Making drug orders
• Handling billing and insurance
• Providing counseling
• Inventory, sales, and more.

 Let’s see some of the main benefits of pharmacy management software:

• Improving Pharmacists Efficiency

Pharmacy managers or pharmacists spend most of their time dispensing medications. This requires more concentration, a significant verification process, drug interaction checking, and more. However, by implementing PMS, these tasks are handled automatically, resulting in more time for pharmacists to interact with patients.

• Enhancing Patient Health Outcomes

Patients are increasingly seeking counseling from pharmacy managers. With PMS, this process becomes easier, helping them get better counseling either directly or indirectly. One of the best options to do this is online communication on a patent portal, which will save pharmacists more time and help them communicate with more patients in less time.

• Preventing Medicine Fraud

Pharmacists oversee the distribution of controlled dangerous substances (CDSs) by entering all prescription data into the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP) database and verifying it while administering medications. A PMS coupled with the PDMP portal reduces logging time and effort to a few clicks by automatically adding information to the patient’s history.

Wrapping up, 

Starting and running a retail pharmacy requires pharmaceutical knowledge and business sense, along with a commitment to meeting the community’s needs. Here are some quick fixes to help your retail pharmacy succeed in the competitive landscape. 

• Classify the demand of your customer.
• Follow the pharmaceutical regulators’ protocols.
• Integrate with an intelligent pharmacy management system (PMS).
• Overstocking or understocking is bad for retail pharmacy owners.
• Put a “complaint box” on your billing counter.
• Hire qualified staff

A pharmacy management system can simplify management operations to boost productivity. Some systems allow pharmacists to create standard operating procedures (SOPs), which are written documents describing how routine tasks and procedures are carried out within a company. SOPs are an integral part of the pharmaceutical industry, and each department has its SOPs to ensure better work performance.

So, a pharmacy retail management software today and see the difference yourself today! 

Soumyajit