Alphega Pharmacy will trial personalised websites for its UK members later this year, it has announced.
 
The new service is set to be presented at the independent pharmacy support network’s UK conference in May, before being rolled out to members in 2016.
 
The initiative would “take the headache out of the day-to-day running” of a pharmacy website, while ensuring contractors kept all the profits from online sales, Alphega Pharmacy Europe managing director Caitlin Sorrell told the network’s conference in Monaco last week (March 6).
 
Members could use their individually-branded websites to offer patients a wider range of products as well as ‘click and collect’ and home delivery options, Ms Sorrell said.
 
She highlighted that pharmacists would be able to decide the prices of products and have their “name above the door” of the website. “It’s your online pharmacy, not ours,” she told members.
 
Alphega first announced plans for the service in 2013, and Ms Sorrell said it had taken the network “longer than I would have liked” to set it up. It had been an “ambitious project” to create a system that could support more than 6,000 individual websites – each with its own opening times and appointment booking system, she explained.
 
Although Alphega was still deciding how contractors would pay for their own websites, Ms Sorrell said the network was considering asking members in France - where the scheme will launch first - to agree to a monthly subscription. “In the future we may incorporate it into the [membership] fee,” she said.
 
Under the plans, pharmacies will receive support for the services they offer patients, with a “cloud-based” platform for collecting this information due to be developed this year.
 
This would allow pharmacies to create individual health records for patients based on the services they used, Ms Sorrell said. Pharmacies could then conduct “strategic patient follow-ups” and demonstrate the outcomes of interventions to commissioners, Ms Sorrell pointed out.
 
The network would also launch a “loyalty solution” for patients to access promotional offers for discounted pharmacy services by using an Alphega loyalty card or a consumer app, Ms Sorrell added.
 
The data collected from this would give members a “deeper understanding” of their patients’ behaviour, she explained.
 
The loyalty system is being piloted in Italy, but was designed with a “European roll-out in mind” and Alphega would “shortly be confirming” in which country it would launch next, Ms Sorrell added. 

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