Online prescription company Healthera has launched an AI-powered platform it says will allow pharmacies to offer “fully automated” prescription tracking “for the first time”.
It said Healthera Orbit is “the first proprietary machine learning platform” to integrate with the NHS electronic prescription service (EPS) for “full prescription tracking automation”.
The platform “eliminates” the need for pharmacies to “manually update prescription statuses or notify patients when prescriptions are ready”, it added, allowing them to “reclaim hours previously spent on patient calls and status updates”.
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Healthera said its machine learning models are “trained on a decade of prescription lifecycle data” across the company’s network of more than 1,700 pharmacies.
The Orbit platform “learns each pharmacy’s unique dispensing patterns” and enables “optimised prescription notifications to be sent to patients”, it added.
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It also “recognises that pharmacy operations vary significantly”, the company said, and “learns these differences and optimises accordingly”.
It added that the feature is available to all Healthera Pro partner pharmacies in England “at no additional cost” - and that expansion to the rest of the UK is planned for this year, with “versions optimised for regions without EPS infrastructure”.
“Just the beginning”
Healthera CEO Quintus Liu said the company has “spent years building the operational dataset that makes pharmacy-specific machine learning viable”.
He added that the platform was built to be “both accurate and transparent” - and that pharmacies “maintain full control” and “their overrides actually improve the model over time”.
“This is just the beginning,” he said.
“Time-saving directly impacts pharmacy profitability, and Orbit delivers that at scale.”
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It comes after Healthera last month announced a partnership with Uber Eats that allows participating pharmacies across five cities to sell over-the-counter (OTC) medicines and health products on the delivery app.
And it follows the company confirming in December that pharmacy owners can request to have their businesses removed from its directory after numerous people accused it of being “misleading” and “unethical”.
