In the ten weeks since its launch, nearly 400,000 people have now used the prescription tracking feature in the NHS App, which was launched to help reduce unnecessary calls and visits to pharmacies.
Prior to its launch, almost half of all phone calls to community pharmacies are were from patients asking whether their prescription was ready. Those with access to the new feature can now track their prescriptions by logging in to the app to see if their medicines are ‘ready to collect’ or ‘dispatched by pharmacy’ if they are being delivered.
Since the launch, nearly 4.4 million people have viewed their prescription in the app, with 394,000 of them using the tracking feature to check whether their prescription was ready.
There are currently around 1,650 high street chemists – including every Boots in England – currently offering the service, a figure that is expected to grow to nearly 5,000 within the next year, representing 60% of pharmacies.
Dr Vin Diwakar, Clinical Transformation Director at NHS England, recently said: ‘It’s brilliant that so many people are making use of the new Amazon-style tracking feature in the NHS App, which means you can now be sure your prescription is ready before setting off to the chemist.
‘For those who rely on regular prescriptions, the tracker offers near real-time updates on when their medicines are ready, like you can get for your online shopping, and this is all part of our shift to give people more control over their care through the NHS App. It’s also freeing up more time for pharmacists to spend with their patients by cutting the number of calls to chemists.
‘We’re seeing millions more people using the app to easily order repeat prescriptions and get faster access to their test results – I’d encourage anyone who hasn’t logged in for a while to take a look and see how the new features can help them manage their healthcare from wherever they are.’
The NHS App currently has 37.4 million registered users with an average of 11.4 million people logging in each month to manage their healthcare.
Over the last year, there has been a 46% increase in people using the app to order a repeat prescription.
Yasif Salim is the pharmacist and Managing Director at Ryan’s Pharmacy, the second busiest dispensary in Yorkshire fulfilling more than 30,000 prescription items each month. Since they integrated with the NHS App, phone calls have dropped by around 80%.
‘We thought the lines must have gone down at first,’ says Yasif, ‘Normally the phones ring off their hooks with patients asking for updates on their prescriptions. A normal day for us is noisy.
‘Before the digital prescription updates were available on the NHS App the phone would ring constantly. And when it wasn’t ringing, we were just waiting for it to happen. Some days it felt quite stressful and overwhelming.
‘The beauty of it is that in pharmacy we didn’t need to do anything. There wasn’t any switch on preparations that we needed to make, and it didn’t add any additional steps into the dispensing process. We could just carry on as usual and everything was handled by Pharmacy Manager.’
Dr Charlotte Refsum, Director of Health Policy at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change recently said: ‘The NHS App will live or die on how intuitive, slick and convenient it is to use, so this announcement from NHS England today is welcome. A new function in the app to track prescriptions is exactly the sort of consumer-focused design needed to drive its success.
‘The next few years are a once in a generation chance to reinvent the NHS experience through the App and we are excited to see future developments.’
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