Background
Message Dynamics is one of the leading suppliers of automated voice and text messaging solutions in UK healthcare.
British chemists dispense over 800 million medicines each year:
An average pharmacy dispenses 5,000 drug items to 2,500 repeat patients per month
- A further 10% are transmitted electronically and this is set to rise steeply.
- Such that ‘Patients will no longer need to visit their GP to collect repeat prescriptions…’
With EPS R2, scripts will automatically be sent to the pharmacy that the patient nominates: So customer retention becomes key to the pharmacy.
Working on behalf of pharmacies, Message Dynamics set out to enable communications with consenting patients via either voice message or SMS text to:
Improve customer service
Improve operational efficiency
Improve customer loyalty and revenue per patient
Business Challenge
In order to provide services to the UK pharmacy market on a scalable basis, Message Dynamics needed to ensure that they could automate any service that would be offered, whilst at the same time providing a messaging capability that was flexible enough to cope with the anticipated growth in users.
Automation is key not only from a scalability perspective but also from a work flow requirement. If a pharmacist was required to find a way to call each and every patient it would take a huge amount of valuable customer facing time and expensive resource. In addition, how would they know who to call and when? Who do they have permission to call? Which number to use? What would they do with the results? How would all this data be recorded?
To be able to offer automation meant being integrated with the Pharmacies own management software. To make this possible Message Dynamics reached an agreement with Cegedim RX.
Cegedim Rx is the market leading supplier of software solutions and computer services to the UK pharmacy market. Pharmacy Manager and Nexphase are the leading PMR solutions in the UK and used by many organisations including Boots, The Co-operative Group, Superdrug and Morrison’s, as well as over 50% of the independent pharmacy market.
When asked about the key design requirements Brian Hamilton commented “…It was vital that we had a robust, reliable and secure system that was also very responsive to ensure we would always send the right message to the right patient at the right time”.
Over 70% of prescriptions are repeat medications for chronic long term conditions. By sending automatic reminders that a refill is due Message Dynamics reduces the risk that forgetful patients inadvertently miss some days of therapy because they did not request their prescription in time.
The service can also help those patients who may have compliance issues, by giving the patient the opportunity to raise any issues they have concerning their medication with the pharmacist. The service can potentially also be used to maximise take up of winter flu campaigns and support other community health initiatives such as smoking cessation programmes.
For the patient, there need be no more wasted journeys to pharmacies or long waiting times for patients at the dispensary as Message Dynamics can tell the patients when their medicines are ready for them to pick up.
By using the telephone, Message Dynamics can make the service available to virtually the whole population in any language.
Under Release 2 of the government’s Electronic Prescription Service patients need no longer have a prescription form to receive their medications. Message Dynamics ensures that paperless patients still know when their refills are being ordered and when their medicines are ready for them to collect.
In order to provide this sophisticated automated service in conjunction with Cegedim’s software, Message Dynamics needed a reliable technology partner who had the proven experience and expertise to provide a flexible messaging platform and also develop an application to provide the key workflow and reporting features.
Solution Overview
In order to help Message Dynamics develop a solution, Voicescape first of all had to understand what the key work flow requirements were, where all the required data was and what the reporting requirements would be.
Using a number of its technology solution components, Voicescape was able to build an application for Message Dynamics that met all of the business challenges.
One core challenge that the solution had to meet was the extraction of the relevant data against which to make the pharmacy calls.
Fortunately this type of challenge is at the centre of the Voicescape approach to application building, so Voicescape developed the “Message Dynamics Pharmacy Application” which was integrated with Cegedim’s pharmacy software and also with Voicescape’s messaging platform.
Conclusion
Message Dynamics have successfully rolled out their service into a number of British pharmacies and are now providing the anticipated benefits to patients.
Richard Jackson of Message Dynamics speaks highly of Voicecape’s approach “Voicescape were able to quickly grasp the complexities of the environment we operate in and our resulting needs. This lead to the production of a high quality specification which when combined with Voicescape’s development expertise and the ability to prototype messages resulted in the fast delivery of a high quality application.”
