Summary: This article highlights how pharmacy automation improves efficiency, reduces medication errors, streamlines communication, enhances inventory management, and lowers operating costs to ensure smoother operations and future success in long-term care pharmacy.

Table of Contents:

1. More Efficient Dispensing
2. Fewer Medication Errors
3. Seamless Communications
4. Better Inventory Management
5. Reduced Operating Costs

These days, all the savviest businesses rely on some form of automation to save time and money; the pharmaceutical industry is no exception. Pharmacy automation is a game-changer for long-term care (LTC) pharmacies, helping maximize efficiency and reduce costs to run a smoother, more successful operation.

If your LTC pharmacy isn’t taking advantage of automation technology just yet, there’s no better time than the present to enhance and future-proof your business. Let’s discuss five ways automation helps LTC pharmacies improve efficiency and generate cost-savings:

Pharmacy automation systems improve efficiency by optimizing the entire prescription filling process. Automating time-consuming dispensing tasks—such as refilling prescriptions, generating labels, and accommodating compliance packaging requests—frees up your pharmacy staff, allowing them to focus on more impactful work.

More specifically, long-term care provides a unique opportunity for workflow automation that is not often present in other pharmacy environments. Because LTC pharmacies serve patients for extended periods of time—often with minimal changes to their medication regimens—automating the cycle fill process enables significant time savings that are integral to your business’s long-term success.

Manual workflows are inherently error-prone—even for the most careful pharmacists and technicians. Medication errors are especially dangerous for long-term care residents, who are often polypharmacy patients with multiple prescriptions at one time.

Fortunately, pharmacy automation has the power to reduce (and even eliminate) dispensing errors, greatly improving accuracy and enhancing patient safety. Because pharmacy automation systems operate based on predefined rules, they minimize the need for human intervention and therefore reduce the likelihood of human error. For example, pharmacy automation systems prevent mislabeling mishaps that lead to patients receiving the wrong dosage.

Playing phone tag and dealing with stubborn fax machines doesn’t have to be a necessary evil for your pharmacy. However, communication is essential for establishing trust and building a rapport with your customers—so how can you do so efficiently?

Secure messaging makes it possible for pharmacies, prescribers, and facilities to communicate and collaborate with ease. Plus, the right pharmacy automation system will allow you to set up automated rules to trigger activities that would otherwise impede your efficiency. For instance, if you send a fax that doesn’t go through or that no one replies to in a timely fashion, the system can send it again without human intervention.

Automation also helps LTC pharmacies improve inventory management, ensuring all medications are available when needed. Optimized inventory management not only leads to better patient care and space savings but also helps maintain the financial health of the pharmacy by avoiding unnecessary purchases and waste.

Automated systems provide real-time tracking of medications and supplies, offering better visibility, insight, and control over pharmacy inventory. With a real-time view of what’s on hand at any given time, LTC pharmacies can more effectively optimize stock levels, reduce overstock or stockouts, and minimize waste due to expired medications.

There are many financial benefits to implementing pharmacy automation, and inventory management is only one piece of the puzzle. Using a pharmacy automation system reduces operating costs by empowering LTC pharmacies to fill more prescriptions at a faster rate—often with fewer full-time staff required.

Reducing operating costs helps pharmacies increase their cash flow and maximize their margins. This makes it possible to scale over time, enabling your pharmacy to expand its clinical services, bring on new facility customers, and even open new locations.

Save Your Pharmacy Time and Money with FrameworkLTC

There are so many benefits to using pharmacy automation—especially with the right solution and vendor partner by your side.

FrameworkLTC (and the full suite of FrameworkLTC products) can have a significant impact on your day-to-day operations, helping you:

• Save your LTC pharmacy business time and money.

• Enhance the services you provide for facilities and patients.

• Expand your business to serve new markets and facilities.

• Gain greater visibility into inventory, operating, and labor costs.

• Accommodate special requests without adding full-time staff.

• Meet insurance and regulatory requirements with confidence.

• Improve medical billing processes to leave no money on the table.

Want to learn more about the benefits that come with a customized, fully integrated pharmacy automation solution? Schedule a demo of FrameworkLTC to see the benefits firsthand and start embracing automation in your pharmacy.