NHS England (NHSE) today (August 9) announced that “nearly 400,000 people” have used the prescription tracking feature on the NHS app since its launch 10 weeks ago.
The “Amazon-style” tracker – which has helped to reduce “unnecessary calls and visits to pharmacies” – has “already been used 715,000 times since May”, equivalent to “once every nine seconds”, it said.
The feature allows people to check the status of their medication “as easily as their online shopping” and has enabled “4.4 million” patients to view their prescription in the app since its launch, it added.
Read more: ‘Amazon-style’ script tracker to expand to 60% of pharmacies
According to NHSE, “around 1,650 high street chemists – including every Boots in England – are now offering the service”.
It added that some 394,000 people have used the feature to check whether their prescription was ready.
This represents just a small rise in usage since parliamentary under secretary for health and social care Baroness Merron revealed in May that “nearly 1,500 pharmacies” were offering the tracking feature.
“Free up” pharmacy time
Health secretary Wes Streeting said that the government was “driving the reform necessary to make the NHS as easy and convenient to use as doing your shopping or banking online”.
“Queuing up at the pharmacy only to find their medicines aren’t ready” is no longer necessary for patients he said, adding that there will also be “no more time-consuming phone calls with pharmacy staff”.
“Get the NHS App now - track your prescriptions, skip the in-person lines, and free up both yours and your pharmacist’s time,” Streeting said.
Read more: NHS App script tracker: ‘We thought phone lines were down’
NHSE clinical transformation director Dr Vin Diwakar similarly highlighted that the tracker was “freeing up more time for pharmacists to spend with their patients by cutting the number of calls to chemists”.
And Tony Blair Institute for Global Change Dr Charlotte Refsum said that “the NHS App will live or die on how intuitive, slick and convenient it is to use”, adding that “the next few years are a once in a generation chance to reinvent the NHS experience through the app”.
“Game-changer”
National Pharmacy Association chief executive Henry Gregg said that the prescription tracking feature is “a game-changer”, adding that “if rolled out equitably to all pharmacies, it will encourage greater use of the NHS app”.
“Pharmacies want to do all they can to embrace new technology and make the vital services they offer as easy and convenient as possible for patients to access,” he said.
Gregg added that anything that allows “pharmacies to focus on delivering first-class patient care, rather than spending time on phone calls to provide prescription status updates is welcome news”.
Read more: ‘Domino’s-style’ prescription tracking to roll out from January following pilot
It comes after NHSE announced in May that the prescription tracking feature was set to be rolled out to “nearly 5,000 more pharmacies” over the next year.
And one of the sites that took part in the pilot programme revealed in the same month that when the feature was introduced in October, staff thought that “the phone lines must have gone down”.
