A new prescription tracking feature on the NHS App has made the volume of calls at one pharmacy “far more manageable”, C+D last week (May 23) learned.
Last week, NHS England (NHSE) announced that the “Amazon-style” feature – which allows patients to track their prescriptions in “real-time” – is set to be made available to nearly 5,000 more pharmacies over the next year following an initial rollout to just 15% of English pharmacies.
Read more: ‘Amazon-style’ script tracker to expand to 60% of pharmacies
Ahead of the nationwide expansion, one of eight beta-test sites that took part in the pilot programme has revealed that when the feature was introduced in October, staff thought that “the phone lines must have gone down”.
Ryan’s Pharmacy managing director and pharmacist Yasif Salim said that “a normal day for us is noisy”.
The West Yorkshire online pharmacy processes 30,000 items monthly and “normally the phones ring off their hooks with patients asking for updates on their prescriptions”, he added.
“Overwhelming”
“Before the digital prescription updates were available on the NHS App, the phone would ring constantly – and when it wasn’t ringing, we were just waiting for it to happen,” Salim said.
“Some days it felt quite stressful and overwhelming,” he added.
Read more: Under 1.5k pharmacies using NHS app prescription tracker feature
“We pride ourselves on our customer service and that means trying our very best not to let a call go unanswered,” he said.
“But some nights I went to sleep and dreamed of the phones ringing and I know that feeling ran across the whole team,” he added.
“Breathing space”
Reflecting on the new app feature, Salim said that “there wasn’t any switch-on preparations that [staff] needed to make and it didn’t add any additional steps into the dispensing process – we could just carry on as usual”.
“The integration has clearly given us more breathing space in pharmacy to focus on what we do best and to help relieve some stress,” he added.
“We’ll always have phone lines open for patients who don’t want to check their prescription status online,” he said.
Read more: ‘Domino’s-style’ prescription tracking to roll out from January following pilot
“But having the NHS App serve up prescription updates has made those phone enquiry volumes far more manageable,” he added.
Cegedim Rx, the company that operates Ryan’s Pharmacy’s NHS App-integrated patient medication record (PMR) system, told C+D that the update can help pharmacies “cope with…unprecedented patient demand”.
Cegedim Rx product director Leanne Hackett said that it was “wonderful to see the positive impact this integration is having on the pharmacy floor”.
Read more: Pharmacies to digitally check script exemptions for patients on universal credit
“Technology can take away some of the additional pressure of fielding a large volume of patient calls into pharmacy,” she said.
“It may sound like a small win, but in reality, for those frontline teams it’s a big gain,” she added.
NHSE first revealed its plans to roll out “prescription tracking” on the NHS App in October following a pilot that concluded that month.
Meanwhile, health minister Karin Smyth last week revealed that the government has “no plans” to extend real-time exemption checking (RTEC) to all electronic prescription service (EPS) pharmacies.
