At Digital Pharmacist, we’re committed to pursuing continuous improvement. In 2020, we set our focus on helping pharmacies reach patients and celebrate real business growth and successes, despite a global pandemic. Here is our 2020 year in review.

Digital Pharmacists’ digital engagement and communication solutions have connected thousands of pharmacists and patients during COVID-19. 

Last year, our clients saw:

• 20.1 million inbound phone calls 
• 13.4 million website sessions
• 11.75 million IVR and digital (website and mobile) refills
• 334.1 million digital marketing impressions

Our mobile app was downloaded nearly 300,000 times and we saw nearly 630,000 secure messages sent by both pharmacists and patients on our secure messaging platform.

Here are some of Digital Pharmacist’s most memorable quarterly highlights of 2020.

Q1 and Q2 Highlights

We began the year by improving our product development process and ability to ship software faster as well as updating our secure messaging product. Some of our messaging updates included:

• Launching an inbox on our mobile app so patients could easily access secure messaging
• Adding emoji support for more personalized communication
• Allowing patient-initiated messages to encourage 2-way conversations

In our client portal, we made the reporting dashboard more robust, adding digital marketing capabilities so pharmacies could track ad performance and identify incoming patient calls generated by marketing efforts with call tracking. 

When COVID-19 hit the country in February and March, we immediately took action, adding a regularly updated pandemic help section and banners to customer websites.

In Q2, we concentrated on supporting pharmacy customers as they struggled to pivot and serve patients during COVID-19. By focusing on streamlining and improving the refill process infrastructure and secure messaging product, we were able to respond to the increased need for digital pharmacy engagement and communication tools.

We also:

• Simplified the client portal login process and extended sign-in for up to 12 hours
• Launched a messaging app walkthrough for new users and improved messaging data reporting
• Supported push notifications for mobile

Q3 and Q4 Highlights

Early fall saw the launch of our updated direct secure communications platform with bulk and targeted messaging capabilities, workflows, and premium clinical opportunities features to improve patient PDC scores and adherence. 

We made Face and Touch ID support available on iOS versions of our pharmacy mobile app to maximize security and added a free Medicare plan finder and enrollment tool to our branded health sites. Finally, we made the previous IVR auto-attendant feature available on the updated version and optimized IVR call tracking.

In the final quarter of 2020, we continued to build out more robust reporting for iOS and Android and modernized processes for our mobile app development. We also added user management controls in the pharmacy dashboard that allowed pharmacists to control user access.

Looking Ahead

2020 year in review; was a year of many changes for pharmacy and highlighted an industry-wide shift towards digital tools as a means of communication and business development. 2021 began with two FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccines, marking the next phase of recovery and hope for a pandemic-free future.

Digital Pharmacist has been proud to support pharmacies nationwide as they’ve worked to serve patients and grow their businesses this past year. We look forward to another year of helping our clients succeed, through COVID-19 and beyond.