The medical industry has seen the biggest rise because of the narrowing tradition of manual data file management. Technology is fast-paced and growing industries are taking the help of applications for operating efficiently. Because of the huge demand for medicines due to the pandemic outbreak, the pharmaceutical industry has faced massive disruptions. Thus, there is a need for some reliable automation techniques.
A pharmacist needs to check the prescription, interpret the prescription, assess the correct dosage, and dispense drugs, and that too with a hundred percent accuracy. Alongside comes the task of completing the insurance forms, furnishing bills, and fulfilling the company’s financial obligation. Keeping a record of drug inventory, cash invoices, and maintaining accounts, sometimes becomes hard amidst a huge rush.
IT interference in the traditional sphere is considered beneficial for offering automation and reliability to the industry. The apps are becoming an integral part of any pharmacy business and therefore investment in pharmacy management software is a good idea for businesses. Staying competitive and delivering better health care is easier with a perfect app. A custom pharmacy-enabled system allows the integration of features and functionalities as per the business requirements. This not only helps the businesses run smoothly but also with a myriad of jam-packed features, there is huge revenue generation. But with an increased number of feature integrations, the overall cost of pharmacy software development also rises.
Implementation of a pharmacy management application benefits the pharmacy business by making management super easy, addressing the shortage, streamlining work, fetching timely reports, and centralizing the data with optimum security.
The pharmacy management system development is popular worldwide with its highest demand in North America. According to the reports, the market for pharmacy apps is taking a huge leap forward, where it is expected to grow with a CAGR of 10.73% from 2021 to 2026. The big players in this pharmacy management app market such as McKesson Corporation, Talyst, and Becton Dickinson and Company were early entrants who have captured the market very well, but still, there is a huge potential that can be reaped if you look to implement pharmacy management system development.
Table of Contents
What is A Pharmacy Management Software?
A pharmacy management software is particularly a system that is being used in the automation of processes, workflows, and billing requirements of the pharmacy stores. For operations like checking and managing inventory, to review the physician’s prescription, handling insurance and billing, providing counseling, and following all the compliances and legal protocols while handling all such work, there is a need for robust software.
The online pharmacy app manages the transactions and all data related to single or multiple stores. Doctors can directly send the prescription to stores and direct the patient to pick up the medicine or get delivered at home.
Almost all tasks which do not require human intelligence and experience can be done through pharmacy software. A feature-rich pharmacy software allows automating business-related processes such as inventory management, drug dispensing, insurance claim management, payment management, tax and utility management, and report management. These apps are built to meet the standards and security protocols of insurance.
Look at some statistics related to the Pharmacy Management Software Development market.
As per reports from the IMS Institute of healthcare informatics, approximately 80% of the total patients visiting a doctor are prescribed some or other medication. By the year 2021, the total number of prescriptions is expected to rise by 1 billion.
- Global pharmacy sales were valued at $1.25 trillion in 2019 and are projected to rise to 1.27 trillion by 2023.
- North America is the most viable market which covers 40 percent of the market share comprising the USA, Canada, and Mexico.
- The medicine counterfeiting incident increased by 25 percent in the year 2017.
- The American college of clinical pharmacy estimated 5 billion prescriptions to be dispensed by 2021.
Why Pharmacy Management Software is Required?
A pharmacy management software is intended to ease the complex work of pharmacy workers and owners. The standard operations of a pharmacy chain and store might face numerous glitches and human-generated errors. The challenges of manual processes slow down the growth of the business.
Here are a few glitches or barriers that necessitate the Pharmacy Management Software Development for your store.
1. Inconsistency
Often the workflow of two stores differs in nature. When two stores merge, it becomes complicated to assimilate the workflow and processes. The inconsistent procedures, confusing receipts, and business process irregularities occur while combining the data. To resolve this issue, there is a need to follow a course of action that can streamline all business operations. A proper PMS system eliminates such issues and streamlines the workflow of 100 stores in a chain.
2. The Old Type of Prescriptions
Many doctors still write prescriptions on letterhead, that a patient needs to take care of. The illegible handwriting of doctors sometimes leads to misunderstanding, which may result in an incorrect dispatch of medicines or the formation of long waiting queues. Even in maximum cases, the patients cannot keep these paper-based prescriptions safe for future use.
3. Billing Mistakes
Manual billing glitches such as incorrect taxes, incomplete entries, wrong name of medicine, outdated entries, and calculation mistakes are some common problems associated with manual work. An automated pharmacy management system solves all such issues in one go.
3. Inventory Management Problems
Inventory management is not just limited to the stock maintenance service. In fact, the Pharmacy Management Software Development involves the integration of AI for ordering the medicine and decreasing/increasing the order quantity as per needs. Also, stock maintenance helps assess the stock value in transit.
4. Rules and Regulation
In the pharmaceutical industry, the Govt. regulations kept on changing for certain medicines. In the case of a few drugs, it is mandated to show the prescription as then only the pharmacists are allowed to provide it to the patients. And in the case of general medication, a prescription is not mandatory. Thus, it is necessary to know which drug requires a compulsory prescription. To handle these types of work requirements, a good PMS system is much needed.
Once you are aware of the reasons that show how much essential it is to have software for pharmacy stores, let’s check the advantages of pharmacy management software:
Benefits Associated with Pharmacy Management Software
Custom pharmacy management software delivers the optimum level of customer care and business benefits. It can maximize profits and offer more opportunities for generating business. There are several benefits associated with the pharmacy software, a few of them are:
- Flexibility for customization
- Low-cost ownership
- Better productivity and increased profitability
- Wide range of modules for different login
- Privilege management for different roles
- Barcode scanner integration
- Database update
- Increase sales
- Expiry date alert for all drugs
- Better decision-making according to trends
- Centralized data storage with fast retrieval
- Better drug-to-drug interaction knowledge
- Simple and user-friendly UI
What are the Prominent Features of the Pharmacy Management Software?
For the perfect full-fledged software, tracking inventory, generating reports, managing workflows, and maintaining complex real-time instructions are common features. It has several other essential features too such as:
HIPAA Regulatory Compliance
The pharmacy system must be compliant with HIPAA and other regulations.
User-friendly System
The pharmacy software needs to be secure and user-friendly. Recalling the patient and feeding the patient prescription is way easier with the PMS.
Prescription Management
Capable software must be able to manage the full prescription given by the doctors.
Claim Processing System
Setting up insurance claims and keeping the record of claim submission is important and can easily be handled with the PMS.
Safe and Accurate
The online pharmacy software reveals fail-safe features. This leaves no scope for errors.
Accurate Drug Interaction Database
An experienced pharmacy management software development company knows the risk associated with the drugs. Software must be able to calculate the drug-to-drug interactions. This reduces the possibility of ADE and ensures patient safety.
Account Receivable Management
AR management is important in Pharmacy Management App Development for smooth functioning. The owed amount must be refunded within the time. The system looks upon the denied claims and helps you in reopening the cases for getting a reimbursement.
Drug Database Updates
A perfect drug database must be well updated with the new launches of drugs and multiple variants.
Auto Wiring
Auto wiring is meant to fax or send the doctor’s prescription directly to the pharmacist, saving the time of the patient.
Report Generation
At the end of the month, you need to be able to generate the reports, where you get to see the stock, sales updates, and revenue for the month. With the use of a PMS, the calculations are correct and fast too.
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Advance Features of Pharmacy Management Software
If you hire a reliable mobile app development company for your project, it will help in the sound integration of features and functionalities to make the app scalable. You may or may not decrease the features as per your requirements, but still, you can find your app laden up with several features. It makes pharmacy management flawless. You can stretch the boundaries of your success with the help of such features.
Data Loading
Data entry is the basic function of any app while deploying it over the store. But a pharmacy app may have multiple chains of stores. And every store might deal with several pharmaceutical companies. Feeding the data one by one is a very tiring and trivial task. The system needs to be capable enough to load entire data using an excel or .csv file.
Inventory Handling
This is the most essential feature integrated into any kind of pharmacy management software. A proper app relieves you from other tasks and allows you to focus on business improvement. Moreover, it also ensures accuracy in medication dispensing.
E-prescription
With PMS software, e-prescriptions can be sent directly from doctors to pharmacists. The doctors in-network can share the electronic prescription, where keeping the record also becomes easy.
Barcode
Barcode verification is an essential tool to keep track of the product. Barcode verification eases several aspects such as information retrieval, POS scanning, product verification, and maintaining the accuracy of the data.
Fast and Advance Report
An app must be able to create capable multi-faceted reports. For such features, the app makes use of extensive built-in libraries and custom reports based on information.
Cost to Develop Pharmacy Management Software
With a comprehensive understanding of pharmacy management software, it is also necessary to know how much does pharmacy software cost. For this, you can discuss it with an experienced pharmacy management software development company. However, if you are not going to hire a pharmacy software developer, it might become a challenging task for you to determine the pharmacy management software cost and to know about the factors that can fluctuate this cost. For your assistance, here are the quick details of the cost-affecting factors.
- ERP and CRM modules
- AI and ML integration
- Third-party API integration
- Mobile app/ desktop app
- Data Migration cost
- Maintenance cost
If we talk about pharmacy software development cost, it completely depends on the pharmacy software development company you hire. Below mentioned is the cost of developers charged by companies in different countries:
US: $120-$200 per hour
Europe: $100-$150 per hour
Asia: $25-$50 per hour
A fully-featured pharmacy management system helps in streamlining the workflow for patient medication adherence and drug dispensing & storage management. To optimize the operational efficiency of the pharmacy employees, businesses can hire a software development company and the average cost of pharmacy management software development ranges from $10,000 to $25,000.
Technology Stack for Pharmacy Management Software
The pharmacy management software needs to be timeless and future-proof. The use of the latest technology is necessary for integrating the most advanced and useful features. The integration of artificial intelligence is another crucial demand nowadays. When you hire app developer, you need to look for the developers’ technical skills. We can say, the cost of an app is also influenced by the technology stack selected for the app development.
To build a robust PMS, the following technology stack is suggested to be favorable:
Front end: Java, Swift, HTML, Angular, React
Back End: Python, Laravel, Node.JS
Database: Mongo DB, Postgre SQL
GPS: Google Maps, Location Tracking
Payment Gateway: Braintree, Stripe API, PayPal
Cloud: Google Cloud, AWS
Wrap up
With the help of the right technology and the integration of the right set of features, the pharmacy management software can give your business great operational success along with huge revenue generation. You can also keep the doctors in the network to speed up the process of e-prescription.
The forward-thinking pharmacy owners are hiring developers for building a functional pharmacy management system. All that is required is to first assess the requirements of your pharmacy store and then build a defined strategy for utilizing the app. From a technical perspective, you can take the help of a mobile application development company that has hands-on experience in developing such on-demand applications and software.
SemiDot Infotech is a well-known name in the mobile app development industry as there are professionals and expert app developers to help turn your dream project into reality.
