A critical part of managing your pharmacy is managing your staff.
Your staff is made up of many different people, with different backgrounds, skills, and experiences they bring to the table. In your pharmacy, each person takes on their own roles and responsibilities, which allow you to keep your business running smoothly.
Your staff may dispense prescriptions, they may schedule appointments, or they may simply offer a helping hand where needed.
No matter how they go about it, each of your staff members contributes to your pharmacy, and together, you make patient care possible.
With All Hands on Deck
With all hands on deck, though, you may find it difficult to measure each team member’s work and determine the individual contributions they make on a day-to-day basis.
In the process, you may miss out on acknowledging each person’s work, offering helpful feedback, and collectively moving forward as a team.
This is why team management is so important 一 and why you need a tool to do it more effectively.
Your pharmacy software may be the tool you’re missing. Among its many other features, your software system can enable you to keep your team organized and on task. Whether you want to manage your pharmacists, technicians, or support staff, your software can help you do it all.
Using your software, you can get valuable insights on your team that help you to be a better leader and run a better business. Going beyond the business level, your pharmacy software can help you to develop stronger professional relationships and tell your team thank you.
Your team is the backbone of your pharmacy, so it is important to pick a software that can support them. With the right technology, here's what you can do:
Manage Time
As the saying goes, time is your most valuable resource.
On any given day, you only have so much time to complete your pharmacy’s to-do list. Consequently, you and your team have to use your time wisely.
If you want to know how time is being spent and how you can better allocate it, your pharmacy software system can give you several tools to do so. Not all systems offer the same features, but the best ones provide you with the tools you need to track time efficiently.
First, your pharmacy software system may offer a clock-in/clock-out feature, which can give you weekly or biweekly reports of how much time your team spends working. In your software system, you can see when a team member arrives, when they take breaks, and when they leave for the day.
This detailed summary can help you to make scheduling decisions, address time issues, and figure out when your team is most active.
Second, your software may also let you see what they are doing while on the clock: whether at the front-end, in a clinical services station, or in a specific part of the workflow.
To do this, your software may monitor prescriptions your team fills, tests they administer, or POS transactions they make 一 giving you a comprehensive look at their daily responsibilities.
With a better understanding of where your team spends their time, you can determine which services are most in-demand and assign the necessary people and resources to complete the ones that are most important.
Delegate Responsibilities
When you assign and oversee tasks, your pharmacy software system can also help to simplify the process.
In the software, you may be able to assign certain responsibilities to certain team members and track their progress in a given time frame. The ability to assign tasks is helpful for larger projects that involve multiple people, as it can allow you to delegate responsibilities evenly and make sure each one gets completed.
In addition to assigning tasks to team members, you may also be able to grant them permission to view and edit information from within the software.
With this feature, you can enable certain staff members to access information but limit others from doing the same. This is particularly useful when dealing with sensitive patient information, which should be protected as much as possible.
Thus, your software can not only help you to manage your team but also to keep your confidential information safe.
Measure Performance
As you manage your team’s time and responsibilities, you may also want to monitor their performance to see where improvements can be made.
There are several different ways that you can determine performance, depending on each team member’s role in the pharmacy. For instance, if their main job is to manage prescriptions, you can measure performance by how many prescriptions they fill. If they focus on vaccinations and immunizations, you can measure performance by calculating how many shots they administer.
Or, for a more qualitative approach, you can determine performance based on patient satisfaction surveys or by team assessments.
However you decide to measure performance, your software system may help you by way of custom reports.
In addition to offering you standard financial and operational reports, your software may let you create your own reports, using your own performance metrics, to track your team members’ progress.
In your reports, you can calculate performance over time and set real, tangible goals for your team to reach. You may even be able to set notifications for when a staff member accomplishes a goal 一 so that you can acknowledge them in a timely manner.
With reporting capabilities, you can make sure that your team keeps moving forward.
Conclusion
When you shop for a new pharmacy software system, it is important to consider not only how it will benefit you but how it will benefit your team. The top software systems give you the tools you need to monitor, track, and support your staff, leading to better outcomes all around.
With the right software at your fingertips and the right team by your side, your pharmacy can see success.
