SHELF OBSESSED

We’ve spoken plenty in this space about the myriad challenges faced by pharmacists. One that we haven’t covered yet is as ironic as it is vexing: the point at which all of your work and sweat equity finally positions you for expansion, only to hit a wall — whether a literal one imposed by your existing space, or a metaphorical one in the form of local building codes and other restrictions on pharmacies — that limits your options and elbow room alike. There’s a solution: careful pharmacy design that maximizes your space.

Even though the medical and legal landscape is changing with astonishing speed, there are still plenty of challenges for cannabis dispensaries. With our decades’ worth of combined experience in pharmacy design, retail consulting, workflow, and shelving installation, Shelving Design Systems has plenty of insight to offer. Today, let’s take a look at the front end of your dispensary.

According to the NIH, prescription errors are a relative rarity. However, when they do occur, they often have grave consequences. Patients can experience severe side effects, medication injuries, and even death when the wrong medication is dispensed, the dosage is wrong, or if the label contains errors. Even in the best-case scenario — the pharmacist or patient catches the mistake before the medication is taken — those errors erode trust and can even expose your pharmacy to lawsuits. As the above-cited NIH study states, error prevention matters “because pharmacies dispense such high volumes of medications that even a low error rate can translate into a large number of errors.”

So how can your pharmacy protect itself and its patients?

If you've followed our blog or subscribed to the Shelving Design Systems mailing list for any length of time, you know that we’re firm believers in pharmacy automation. That belief is not, however, built on faith or intuition; it comes from years’ worth of time spent on pharmacy design and observing the results. And we’re not the only ones paying attention. Although a study conducted by the National Institutes of Health on the effects of pharmacy automation wasn't exactly a page-turning thriller, it underscored the effectiveness of automation. Having answered our question a bit early, let’s take a closer look at how and why automation works — and whether it’s effective for small pharmacies as well as larger concerns.

In the competitive environment of today's retail pharmaceutical industry, anything and everything that can be done to improve your pharmacy workflow will serve well in keeping your independent community drugstore thriving. Applying a combination of proven strategies, proper planning and concerted effort can be effective in improving your dispensing process—the key to pharmacy workflow efficiency.

Running a profitable independent pharmacy that recognizes the importance of remarkable customer service provided by a dedicated group of satisfied employees is an ever-engaging process. It may represent the only real means of staying competitive in a highly competitive business. Maintaining an efficient pharmacy workflow is a critical aspect of keeping your competitive edge when going up against national drug store chains, the one-stop-shop grocery store, and other big-box pharmacy outlets, as well as the ever-increasing number of internet and mail order drug providers.

"You've got to spend money to make money" has never been truer than in the case of pharmacy workflow automation. Robots or pill counters aren't cheap to buy, of course, but the benefits they provide, both financial and otherwise, are definitely worth the investment if your pharmacy dispensing volume justifies the expenditure. Installing various forms of automated equipment has proven to improve pharmacy workflow, which benefits both customers and staff members alike.

While there are no hard-and-fast rules that can determine the exact setup of your pharmacy back end area, we can all agree that an efficient pharmacy workflow benefits everyone – customers and staff alike. Part of the secret to creating this efficient workflow is to ensure that the pharmacy workflow stations are appropriately designed and installed and that staff members assigned to those stations are adequately trained for their positions.