Appointment Management System for Pharmacies

Appointment Management in a Pharmacy

The main activity of pharmacies is the sale of medicines and healthcare products. However, in recent years, there has been an expansion of services provided within pharmacies.

Pharmacies often offer a wide range of services to their customers, such as:

• Blood pressure measurement: Many pharmacists are capable of measuring customers' blood pressure.
• Cholesterol testing: Some pharmacies offer cholesterol testing to help monitor heart health.
• Vaccination administration: Some pharmacies can administer vaccines to prevent diseases like influenza.
• Health counseling: Pharmacists can provide health counseling, such as disease prevention, smoking cessation programs, diabetes management, and sexual health.
• Screening services: Some pharmacies offer health screening services, such as blood glucose measurement and hemoglobin A1C level measurement for diabetes management.
• Mental health services: Some pharmacies provide support services for mental health, such as counseling and support for patients with mental disorders.
• Skin care services: Pharmacies also offer skin care services, such as skin consultation and distribution of skin care products.

Many of these services require appointments and have a short duration.
For this reason, it is essential to use an appointment scheduling system like Softvision Agenda that can effectively fill the available time slots throughout the day for your pharmacy's customers.

Self-Booking by Customers

Appointments can be added to the Softvision Agenda reservation calendar by any pharmacy employee through the application's control panel. This method is generally used when patients physically visit the pharmacy to make an appointment or make a phone call. If the number of appointments is quite high (considering vaccinations, for example), it becomes necessary to dedicate an employee exclusively to manually entering appointments.

By using appointment scheduling software, in addition to the previous method, it is possible to provide pharmacy customers with the ability to book their own appointments autonomously, without the intervention of an operator. They just need to access a dedicated website (appointment portal), indicate the type of service to book, the desired date, and the preferred time slot. The system will automatically suggest only the available dates and times.
It is evident how this option greatly reduces the workload within the pharmacy, completely automating the appointment process and eliminating the need for a dedicated appointment operator.

Utilization and Configuration of Softvision Agenda in a Pharmacy

The configuration of the automatic appointment system Softvision Agenda in a pharmacy is relatively simple. Let's see how to proceed:

Definition of Pharmacy Opening Hours

In the "Company" menu of the software control panel, accessible at https://agapp.softvision.it, all the configuration functions of the system are available.
The first operation to be performed is the definition of the pharmacy's opening hours. This way, the system will only accept appointments during the hours when the pharmacy accepts appointments.
By clicking on "Company Hours", you can indicate the morning and afternoon hours for each day of the week. In the following example, the system will accept appointments from 9 am to 1 pm and from 3 pm to 8 pm, every day except Sunday.

Definition of Services Offered in the Pharmacy

A pharmacy can offer a large number of services or visits.
To properly organize the pharmacy's agenda, it is vital to precisely define the services provided, who provides them, and the resources they require.

After indicating the operators (doctors, vaccinators, etc.) working in the pharmacy, the next step is to define all the resources present in the pharmacy that are necessary for providing the services. These resources may include various rooms where the services are performed, any equipment used in different rooms, etc.

The last step is to load all the types of services ("Services") that the pharmacy is capable of providing.
For each service, you need to specify the name, duration, resources required (such as the room where the visit takes place), and the doctor (staff member) who performs the visit.
It often happens that the same type of service can be provided by different staff members. For example, consider the "Dermatology Visit" service if the center has three different dermatologists. In this case, all three dermatologists should be indicated for the service, and the "Require staff member selection" flag should be enabled. This way, when clients make an online reservation, they can choose the doctor they prefer for the appointment, in addition to selecting the type of service.
The same applies if the reservation is manually entered by an operator.