Retail pharmacy is taking on expanded responsibilities to meet consumer demand for accessible clinical services and to grow margins.
But when edge cases and exceptions to daily workflows arise, it can become difficult for pharmacies to demonstrate trustworthiness and consistency. Exception‑based operations also create variability that limits pharmacy’s ability to scale advanced services with confidence.
How are pharmacies managing exceptions and variability in dispensing?
Many pharmacies rely on workarounds and exception handling to absorb daily variability in dispensing operations.
One example of this is veterinary medications. While this revenue stream is growing for retail pharmacies, many pharmacists are not familiar with pet medication dosing best practices. The pharmacist is likely to either blindly trust the prescribing veterinarian or turn to decision support that resides outside of the workflow. That could be in the form of a siloed reference that requires opening another window or even a physical binder, requiring the busy pharmacist to stop everything and flip through pages.
If we look at expanding clinical services, pharmacists often encounter variability within the test-and-treat workflow. Despite state protocols, it falls on pharmacy teams to determine how well-educated patients are on these services, how to prepare for tests, and how to follow up on the results. In general, the pharmacist decides in real-time what educational points to highlight and what to leave out when speaking with a patient.
In these examples and others, pharmacists are forced to pursue extra steps that slow down workflow, or they are compelled to make independent judgment calls that may not align with best practices.