Andrew Pattinson is the Head of Innovation for new merged The Platform Alliance Group and in this episode of the Pharmacy View Podcast, talks to host Scott Carpenter, EVBC about the journey of the group and how technology has been pivotal to that.
Andrew has had a long and proud history in Pharmacy. The son of a Pharmacist, Andrew recalls how being no good at chemistry that Pharmacy wasn’t going to be a career choice. So Andrew went on to study Psychology at university while working at the family’s Pharmacy. As an engaging business leader, Andrew chose to head down the path of consumer and organizational psychology and when working with a consulting firm involved with Pharmacies was pulled into the broader Pharmaceutical industry with Instigo. As a business, Instigo built new solutions for community Pharmacies. It started off just in loyalty and marketing, then they moved into merchandise services, professional health services, in-store clinic programs, business consulting and advisory services. And then over time, they formed strategic alliances with other groups and ended up providing outsourced solutions to those groups. That led to group mergers and have now formed The Platform Alliance Group—positioned to build the strongest Independent Pharmacy Network in Australia.
From today forward, Andrew firmly believes that the focus should be on optimizing the functions within a Community Pharmacy so that patient care can be maximized. Andrew believes that technology has a critical role to play in this and points out the following challenges that need to be overcome to get better outcomes:
• Need to meet the patients/customers where they want to be met
• Sufficient investment
• Managing different technological platforms so that they communicate properly
Topics Covered
• How the Platform Alliance Group was formed
• Services provided by the group
• How to optimize functions to maximize patient care
• Use of technology
• Challenges faced
