‘Suddenly, everything is being done electronically’

Covid-19 has changed customer expectations and increased reliance on digital services. It has also accelerated the implementation of digital healthcare strategies.

"We have always been an innovative pharmacy and very invested in the concept of digital healthcare," says Marina Timotijevic, marketing manager of McCabes Pharmacy group. "As we emerge into the 'new normal', initiatives we took during lockdown will evolve into longer-term plans, like a digital prescription service and video consultations – all developed in response to customer needs during the height of lockdown."

The telephone remains a vitally important communications tool, however. “If we haven’t seen or heard from someone for a while, we will ring them up to check how they are,” says Timotijevic. “As a consequence, we made thousands of telephone calls to our patients in the months of March and April.”

That increased volume created its own problems.

“Because the level of phone calls increased dramatically and our phone system struggled to handle the volume, we are now in the process of rolling out 3Connect across all our outlets,” she says. “We will use it to redirect calls to mobiles or other fixed phones, and we’ll be much better prepared to handle a second wave if it ever comes.

Other digital services include click-and-collect prescriptions, online shopping and online chats with pharmacists

“We are clear that the telephone will remain a very important channel for our customer demographic. Other changes are focused on expanding digital channels.”

Those other digital services include click-and-collect prescriptions, online shopping and online chats with pharmacists.

Online pharmacist

The online pharmacist was available to customers before the advent of Covid-19 but became much more popular during the lockdown. “We created a rota system and made additional pharmacists available to answer questions from customers,” says Timotijevic. “It’s a great example of how digital can enable close human interaction when face-to-face isn’t possible.

"McCabes is rolling out all of the benefits of the 3Connect platform," says Karl McDermott, head of business ICT with Three Ireland. "Three also provides the wide area network service to McCabes. Without that connectivity nothing else works.

“The network is very resilient. Each location has two connections – wireless and wired. We also manage and maintain it for them. Like a roads network, there is a need to constantly maintain and upgrade it in order to cater for demand. As traffic levels increase on the McCabes network, we provide more capacity to meet it.”

He describes that maintenance work as “the uncool stuff”. “The cool stuff is the e-health applications and online ordering and so on but that can’t exist without the underlying network and the ongoing maintenance,” he says.

‘Accelerated’

“Covid-19 has accelerated a lot of things,” McDermott continues. “The HSE has a plan to take patients out of hospitals and care for them in the community to free up capacity. This will be enabled by increased use of digital health applications which are dependent on that connectivity.”

Earlier this year, the Minister for Health removed the requirement for there to be a physical copy of a medical prescription. “GPs can now send prescriptions to pharmacies electronically using the HSE HealthMail service,” he adds. “This is a secure, bounded email service which connects the HSE to health professionals such as GPs, pharmacists and so on.

“Three designed and built HealthMail in conjunction with the HSE around five or six years ago. It has really come into its own this year and traffic on the network has increased by an order of magnitude.”

E-health

That is just one aspect of the accelerated move to e-health services, McDermott adds. “Suddenly, everything is being done electronically. Another example of that is the HealthLink application which GPs have been using to refer patients for Covid-19 testing at community test centres.”

People are only aware of connections when they aren't there

And it all comes back to connectivity. “McCabes obviously need connectivity for 3Connect, HealthMail and other applications,” says McDermott. “We are helping them with their omnichannel communications with their customers. Connectivity is the life support system for that.

“People are only aware of connections when they aren’t there. We have to make sure they are there all the time – they can’t just be wired or wireless, anything can happen, and we have to cater for that. We also have to cater for the fact that a wide area network is a living, breathing, dynamic environment and you have to keep monitoring its health all the time to ensure it is working properly.”