How Priory Pharmacy used ATLAS Pharmacy to reduce dispensing errors and increase revenue

(Source: Christie & Co)

More business, fewer errors

Owner of Priory Pharmacy Prabjaudt Channa discusses how, with the help of ATLAS Pharmacy, which is part of Person Centred Software's Connected Care Platform, his pharmacy business has grown exponentially on the way to achieving greater accountability, increased revenue, more sustainability and a higher accuracy of dispensing. 

Why did you decide to integrate with Person Centred Software? 

I bought Priory Pharmacy about two years ago and when I did, one of my main goals was to grow the care home business. Previously I worked for Boots and one of the best parts of my time there was when I had the opportunity to work with care homes, which I really enjoyed. But I also realised that I wanted to work with care homes in a better way – to strive for more accountability, have greater oversight of everything going on and to move away from doing things on paper.  

So, I knew what I wanted to do, but how would I go about it? After deciding that I wanted to move away from using paper-based systems and to an eMAR system, it was clear to me that Person Centred Software was the company to go with after finding an independent study conducted by the University of Cardiff that analysed medication management in care homes. This alone, in my mind, separated ATLAS from other eMAR systems.  

In the study, Cardiff University experts concluded that PCS’s ATLAS eMAR  could eradicate 21 of 23 different types of errors relating to medications management in care homes – not 21 out of every 23 errors, but error types! The error types that existed were defined in the study prior to the implementation of the system in care homes, so it goes without saying that such an impressive, and independently collected, set of data really won me round to what ATLAS Pharmacy and Person Centred Software more generally could do. 

I knew that ATLAS Pharmacy could find that perfect balance between assuring safety and being cost effective, not to mention helping to grow my business. 

What about changes in revenue? 

On that subject, the effect that it’s had on the business, and the productivity we can achieve, is night and day and then some! When I bought the pharmacy, we started off only doing about 1,000 items a month – fast forward two years and thanks in no small point to ATLAS Pharmacy and we’re doing 9,000 items a month. Whether it’s a pharmacy or any other type of business, such a transformative change in productivity and output means more money, and more customers. A lot more! 

It’s given us the opportunity to do so many of the things I wanted to do when I bought the business, like expand our care home operations, for example, but probably wouldn’t have had the chance to do certainly to the same degree if it wasn’t for ATLAS Pharmacy making the process of servicing care homes so much more streamlined and error-free.  

So, you’re making more money – where are you investing it? 

Such an increase in revenue has really helped us to expand into doing more private services. It’s allowed us to offer more services to the public and it has also given us the chance to pursue something that is really important to me, which is sustainability.  

We’ve had the chance to invest our increases in revenue in things like installing solar panels on the roof of the pharmacy and helping us to ease our dependency on paper by a huge amount. Overall, with our sustainability efforts thanks to such a large increase in revenue, as well as the ease with which ATLAS Pharmacy helps us to operate totally digitally, we’ve managed to become about 70% paperless. As a result of all this, we won Sustainable Pharmacy of the Year at the Pharmacy Business Awards, so thanks to ATLAS, we are making more money, seeing fewer errors and issues, and doing all that while reducing our carbon footprint. 

Can you tell us how it has helped reduce errors? 

You get the extra checks and balances because everything is barcode validated, so you know with absolute certainty that you’re giving the right medication to the right resident, that everything is bagged up correctly. It’s not just helped us to reduce errors on our end that compound down the line and can potentially lead to serious errors in a care home – the fact that the care homes we work with know that they have complete and open communications with us, all in real-time, has really helped our relationship with them. 

I can imagine that a lot of pharmacists have been in the same situation, like I was recently, where someone from a care home rang up asking for a prescription. I was able to tell them that it was in fact delivered because we could tell from our end that it had been booked-in on the system through barcode scanning. It’s really clear cut and it eliminates the problems caused by understandable human errors of communication can easily happen, except now with ATLAS Pharmacy it’s a problem that can be solved by a two-minute conversation rather than a lost morning trying to sort out where the prescription is, and potentially having a disagreement with one of our care homes. Even without all the other ways it helps, this alone makes it of tremendous value because it saves us so much time, which means we have more time to grow our business. 

It’s no exaggeration to say that now I have this integration with Person Centred Software’s products like ATLAS Pharmacy, I could never go back to not having it. 

If you had to pick just one, what is your favourite feature of ATLAS? 

That’s a very tough one because as I’ve already said, it’s helped us in so many different ways. My favourite features of the system have to be that it’s made things so easy for the pharmacy with, for example, things like eLearning which provides the medication training. That’s just another thing we don’t have to think about because we know that it’s covered, and the quality of the training is of the highest standard. 

Barcode validation makes things really safe and the level of accountability you get is unrivalled; I can see when something has been scanned into a care home, I can see that it’s in use, and all the other little things that very soon add up to make a transformative difference to the top level, the nuts and bolts, and especially the bottom line.  

Overall, I’m extremely happy with ATLAS Pharmacy and to be working with Person Centred Software as a company. I would 100% recommend the system to other pharmacists.  

Click here to learn how ATLAS eMAR helped DMP Healthcare save valuable time.