Our Story
We built a piece of software that we planned to use for a pharmacist-led Covid19 drive-through vaccination clinic but never got to use it.
"So we repurposed it and made it even more powerful"
Problem We faced
It was a typical day on the 6th of August 2021. We got a call from the local health authorities that a covid positive patient had visited our pharmacy 3 days ago. They asked all staff working in the last three days to isolate for 14 days. We were required to pay a few thousand dollars in a deep cleaning bill before reopening. It happened a couple of times. It was not like we could wave a magic wand and get extra team members. We had to shut one of our pharmacies down for at least ten days.
Red tape rule one said that pharmacists were only allowed to vaccinate in a closed room in the pharmacy. We could not vaccinate outside this room. Red tape rule two required us to claim a small amount of money to vaccinate a person, but the condition was that you could only claim this payment if the vaccination was done on pharmacy premises.
"Why don’t we vaccinate the members of the public in the empty car park at the back of our pharmacy?"
Amazing in-store journey
While isolating in early August, we thought, why don’t we vaccinate the members of the public in the empty car park at the back of our pharmacy? It will be safer for our team as patients are completing their post vaccination wait in their car and if they are sick then the exposure to our team is limited. Our local Council was very supportive and permitted us. They even sent their team that built the tents to start working.
We lobbied hard to get the rules changed. They eventually got changed, but by then, it was too late. It was a chaotic experience and full of red tape.
So the tool built to allow an 11-member team to successfully vaccinate 700 cars (1000 people) was useless. But then we started using it for our in-store pharmacy workflow. It proved successful in managing the flow. It was so easy to use and allowed us to vaccinate patients using an amazing instore journey. This was how we built ConcertRx.