Some £1.55m worth of unpaid or referred-back items are awaiting action by pharmacy owners, CPE has said.
The negotiator said last week that the latest data from the NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) showed there were over 194,000 unpaid or referred-back items on the Manage Your Service (MYS) portal.
This equates to approximately £1.55m, or an average of £150 per pharmacy, it added, based on the current average national Net Ingredient Cost of around £8 per item.
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Unpaid items are generated when the NHSBSA cannot process a prescription item for payment “due to missing or incomplete endorsed information”.
CPE noted that around 400 pharmacies have over 100 outstanding unpaid items - and that one pharmacy, which has not been named, has 2,637 unpaid items awaiting completion.
It warned that unpaid items are only held on MYS for 18 months from the date they are first returned to the pharmacy for action.
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Around a third (65,000) of the items currently on the system have been left incomplete for over six months, with around 2,700 due to expire within the next month.
Outstanding unpaid items that are not completed and returned before the 18-month deadline will be deleted from the system, CPE said.
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It comes after digital health platform MedPal AI announced the launch of a robotic distribution centre that it said has the capacity to fulfill more than 300,000 prescription items a month.
The company said that its “largest” robotic dispensing facility to date, located at Sarus Court in Runcorn, is “being commissioned in phases” and will start processing more than 2,000 prescription items per day from this month.