Pharmacies are busy places, and filling prescriptions and answering patient queries take up a lot of a pharmacist’s time. Technology has been slow to offer solutions that could help, and it was this gap that prompted Cormac McKenna and Marijus Plančiūnas to develop PharmacyConnect, a SaaS platform that creates own-brand apps for pharmacies to improve the efficiency of their prescription flow and save time for patients and pharmacists alike.
In many cases, prescriptions now go directly from a patient’s GP to their designated pharmacy. On the one hand this makes life easier, on the other it can leave patients unsure as to whether a prescription has been received and is in the process of being filled. As a result, people end up phoning the pharmacy to check or they physically go there and wait for it. With PharmacyConnect patients don’t have to do anything as once they sign up to the app through their local pharmacy they are notified when their prescription is ready for collection.
“From the pharmacy’s perspective, it cuts down on routine patient queries while it also speeds up processing and frees up the pharmacy phone line for patients that really need to call. Those already using the platform are processing nearly 50 per cent of prescribed items through the app now,” McKenna says.
“The platform was originally conceived during the lockdown when my experience of dealing with my local pharmacy was frustrated by having no reliable means of digital communication,” McKenna adds. “It was also clear to me that pharmacy staff were being underserved by the technology on the market. While patient apps existed prior to the creation of PharmacyConnect, they didn’t do the job they were supposed to do, which was to reduce the friction around prescription fulfilment.
“Attempts to deliver workable patient apps in the past largely failed due to poor execution and this has prevented their widespread adoption. Our technology delivers apps at scale for iOS and Android and ease of use was our priority. People told us that older customers wouldn’t use the app. In fact, this is not the case. We have patients in their 90s using it very successfully,” McKenna says.
PharmacyConnect is McKenna’s third start-up. He is also the founder of VillagePay, a payments platform for the hospitality industry, and the co-founder of Sheology, an online publishing and marketing house with a female focus. McKenna has a BBS in Finance from Trinity College and an MBA from INSEAD. The company’s CTO, Marijus Plančiūnas, has an extensive background in full-stack web development and project management.
PharmacyConnect was set up in 2021 and the rollout of the app began in 2022. It was a slow-burn initially, with about 200 users spread across some 40 pharmacies to start with, but McKenna says interest has accelerated significantly in recent months as hard-pressed pharmacies look for ways to streamline their heavy workload.
“Last October, the platform reached the milestone of 200,000 patient interactions, many of which succeeded in replacing a time-consuming phone call to the pharmacy and were instrumental in boosting pharmacy efficiency and improving the patient experience,” says McKenna who estimates the development costs of the platform at about €500,000. Most of this was privately funded, but Wicklow LEO also provided support to the fledgling business.
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McKenna says the focus for now is on signing up Irish-based pharmacies to the platform, but he is already in discussion with several overseas markets where the system will work with local customisation.
PharmacyConnect employs six, including three in-house software developers, and pharmacies can pay a basic fee to access the main features of the app or they can pay a bit more to get add-ons such as an integrated payments system, a delivery service and personalised prompts lists for customers of their regular buys.
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