What the Right Data Can Do For Your Pharmacy

Have you ever noticed that Google seems to know exactly what you’re looking for? If I type in a variety of food for example, it doesn’t give me results for restaurants that serve it or calorie counts. It gives me pages of recipes. I don’t even have to type the word in any more for it to understand what I’m looking for because I’m signed into Chrome when I browse and Google knows my history and habits. 

Slightly creepy? Sure. But really convenient. This is just one example of how data drives businesses. It helps us understand buyer behavior, monitor employees and identify the need for change.  

But for many pharmacies, a history of not having easy access to the right information has created a culture of making decisions based on instinct or habit. But with robust point-of-sale generated data, this doesn’t have to be the case.  Here’s what you can do when the right data really is at your fingertips.  

Be Proactive vs. Reactive – Data is your key for identifying trends and seeing changes as they begin to occur, rather than after the fact.  If you’re not selling specific items anymore, or if suddenly you’re incredibly busy during the last 15 minutes of business every day. You can see this in your sales data long before you’d ever notice it otherwise, allowing you to make stocking changes or change your pharmacy hours to get ahead of these new business trends.  

All the benefits of being there all the time without actually being there – Okay, well maybe point-of-sale can’t do everything you do, but when it comes to monitoring employee performance, it might be even better than actually, being there.  Monitor the number of transactions each employee performs in a given time period, find out if they are changing prices or offering discounts or completing a large number of refunds. Track their login/logout activity. If there’s a problem, you’ll be the first to know, in the pharmacy or not.  

Centralize everything – Many pharmacies have more than one location.  This can represent a unique challenge when it comes to collecting data from your pharmacies and making sense of it all. This is where a point-of-sale solution capable of handling multiple locations is a must. Whether you’re managing a few retail locations, or a large number of outpatient pharmacies, it needs to be easy and fast to obtain data. Spending time chasing down the information you need simply doesn’t make sense with the availability of multi-store and headquarter management solutions from RMS.  

The more you know about your pharmacy, the more successful you’ll be. You don’t have to take my word for it. Check out this article from Computer talk that shows how an RMS customer leverages pharmacy point-of-sale generated data to manage multiple pharmacy locations.