AAH completes successful PMR pilots in England

According to Dave Roberts, superintendent pharmacist at Corden Pharmacy in West Sussex, he and his staff never had enough time in the day to juggle all of the various jobs that they had.

Things are changing though as Dave and his 20-strong team were one of England’s very first pilots for the migration of AAH Pharmaceuticals’ LINK PMR system to the new ProScript LINK PMR system.

Corden Pharmacy was chosen as a pilot for the company’s new IT system, delivered in association with Rx Systems because of the pharmacy’s size, its average monthly script output and its diversity.

Dave said: “As independents go we are quite busy I’d say. We have more than 20 staff, process in excess of 23,000 scripts per month and more importantly we have seven PC terminals that are spread across two PMR systems.”

Corden has been at its present site for around three years but it sits within a very busy health centre with the pharmacy at one end and a dispensing doctors’ surgery at the other with two ProScript Link systems working in tandem.

So crucial is it to the pharmacy that disruptions are kept to an absolute minimum that Dave anticipated a bit of an upheaval. But he says that he had a pleasant shock; “Having been involved in various IT transfers over the years I was expecting the worst, even though we knew that we were in need of upgrading the former system,” he said.

“This was not to be though and the AAH installation team made everything remarkably smooth. They managed to power down one PC at a time rather than all of them as expected which meant that we were completely operational throughout.”

AAH recently completed its migration from LINK to ProScript LINK in Scotland in just 140 days and expects a similar level of success in England.

Leon Rudd, director of marketing at AAH said: “Our customers in Scotland are now benefiting from software that looks and feels familiar and is ready for eCMS.

“We see this as being the catalyst for successful rollouts across the whole of the UK and Corden Pharmacy’s installation demonstrates that this can be both seamless and very beneficial to our customers.”

The pharmacy has been a long-standing customer of AAH’s but this didn’t stop Dave looking at the competition.

Dave said: “There’s no room for sentiment when you have your own business interests at heart but after we weighed up what the competition were offering it became very apparent that ProScript LINK, providing it did what it promised, would be the ideal PMR system for us.

“And it fulfilled all that it promised and more.”

Responsible Pharmacist (RP) modules and all that the contract requires are part of ProScript LINK and Dave says that the time savings have been fantastic. “It’s quick and efficient on labelling and its functionality but the RP module means that everything is taken care of at the click of a button. The RP paperwork would take a couple of hours each day,” he said.

In addition to a fully functional and easy to use PMR system the management and staff at Corden Pharmacy have been very content with the training and support that they have received.

AAH trainers had to manage the nuances of installing two separate systems in the same building to accommodate both the pharmacy and the dispensing doctor but all are in agreement that training has been personal and flexible – with a follow up visit one month on to answer any questions that the 20-plus staff may have had.

Dave concluded: “If I had to pin it down, I’d say that the most pleasing aspect has been the seamless transition. I feared the worst because that has been my experience in the past but I now have a new, fully functional system that not only allows us to do our jobs more efficiently, but was installed with no staff disruptions at all.”