PC: What capabilities are needed from a digital pharmacy in order to provide patients with the various services that they may need?
Hawkins: From a digital pharmacy perspective, in a broader sense, stepping back from AI, a digital pharmacy needs to be agile and have the capability to be able to tailor a service either in a B2B or a B2C scenario. Working with a partner, every partner is different, and everybody has different requirements for their specific medication that they need a digital pharmacy partner for. They may have a different demographic of patients, so having a digital pharmacy that’s able to be agile and modular in a way that it can leverage the right services for that partner easily, quickly, and cost efficiently is incredibly important, and that’s where the strength in digital pharmacy lies.
There’s a plethora of healthcare services out there—from telehealth to specific patient adherence services, to data analytics companies—so having a digital pharmacy that’s able to leverage the right solution at the right time is very important, and that applies both from the patient care perspective as well as from the logistics perspective.
Choosing the right delivery partner for your scenario, choosing the right communication method for your patient demographic, and being able to iterate over that very quickly, while also being able to have the necessary digital tools in place—like having mobile apps, web portals, having both customer and partner-facing tools that gives them the transparency to be able to look at the lifecycle of their experience—is critical. Is adherence going up? What are the factors affecting adherence? Having this digital suite of components together in a single platform that they can leverage is paramount to providing a digital pharmacy service.