Nearly 400,000 people have used a new prescription tracking feature in the NHS App in the first ten weeks since its launch, helping reduce unnecessary calls and visits to pharmacies.
The handy “Amazon-style” tracker allows people to check the status of their medications as easily as their online shopping and has already been used 715,000 times since May – equivalent to once every nine seconds.
Around 1,650 high street chemists – including every Boots in England – are now offering the service, which enables patients to check 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 also using the app’s new tracking feature to check whether their prescription was ready.
Almost half (45%) of phone calls to community pharmacies were estimated to be from patients asking if their prescription is ready, so the new service is helping to free up time for pharmacists to provide advice to patients.
Latest data shows the NHS App now has 37.4 million registered users with an average of 11.4 million people logging in each month to manage their healthcare.
A total of 61.5 million repeat prescriptions have been ordered via the NHS App in the last 12 months – a 46% increase on the previous year (42.2 million). There were also 87.4 million views of patient test results during the same period.
Dr Vin Diwakar, Clinical Transformation Director at NHS England, 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 prescription tracking feature is just one of many planned improvements to the NHS App, which will soon expand to offer patients more appointment options and greater choice as part of the government’s commitment to put patients in control of their healthcare and reduce waiting lists.
The feature is expected to be made available to nearly 5,000 more pharmacies within the next 12 months – covering 60% of those in England.
Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting said: “We are driving the reform necessary to make the NHS as easy and convenient to use as doing your shopping or banking online.
“Nearly 400,000 people are already using our new prescription tracker through the NHS App because it saves them time and hassle – no more queuing up at the pharmacy only to find their medicines aren’t ready and no more time-consuming phone calls with pharmacy staff.
“Get the NHS App now – track your prescriptions, skip the in-person lines, and free up both yours and your pharmacist’s time.
“Through our Plan for Change we are dragging the NHS into the digital age and giving patients more control and choice over their healthcare.”
Ryan’s Pharmacy in Brighouse, West Yorkshire, is the second busiest pharmacy dispensary in Yorkshire – fulfilling more than 30,000 prescription items each month.
Previously, the online pharmacy needed five phonelines to field all the calls from patients with prescription enquiries, but since their IT supplier Cegedim Rx integrated with the NHS App, phone calls have dropped by around 80%.
Pharmacist and Managing Director for Ryan’s Pharmacy, Yasif Salim said: “We thought the lines must have gone down at first. 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.
“We pride ourselves on our customer service and that means trying our very best not to let a call go unanswered. But some nights I went to sleep and dreamt of the phones ringing. And I know that feeling ran across the whole team.
“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.”
The government published its 10 Year Health Plan last month, which sets out how the app will act as a digital front door to the health service, overhauling how people get advice, manage appointments and interact with services to make their healthcare more convenient and more personalised.
For the first time, patients will be able to book, move and cancel all their appointments on the app – ending the ‘8am scramble’ for a GP – and the app will use artificial intelligence (AI) to provide instant advice for patients who need non-urgent care, available 24/7.
Users will be able to self-refer on the app to mental health talking therapies, musculoskeletal services, podiatry and audiology – freeing up GPs and new neighbourhood health centres to focus on providing direct care.
Dr Charlotte Refsum, Director of Health Policy at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change 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.”
Find out more details on how to register with the NHS App
