Procurement Platform to Supply Pharmaceutical Products

Pharmax is a buying group that puts the interest of independent pharmacy owners at its core. Its key principals are to help drive the success of independent pharmacies and to offer products in an efficient and transparent manner through its supply chain partners. To achieve this, the company has access to over 10,000 brokered medicinal products, including Branded medicinal products, Generics, OTC’s and ULM’s. In addition, it maintains continuity of supply with recommended alternates for any out-of-stock medicines.

When Patrick Meehan, director of Pharmax, contacted Blueberry, he wanted to develop a secure web portal for pharmacists and wholesalers that could be used to review both the orders placed and any discounts on the products being bought. In addition to online ordering, the portal also needed to provide the ability for pharmacies to generate reports on their order history and any savings they’d made over the month.

Blueberry was also asked to develop an application programming interface (API) that could receive and process pharmaceutical orders sent by existing pharmacy dispensing software, and then automatically send the processed orders to Wholesaler APIs based on the best discounts for the products being ordered.

Blueberry used Angular, KendoUI, C#, Web Services, Amazon Cloud, and MS SQL Web Ed. technologies to successfully complete the project within the time frame required. The deliverables included:

• An API to receive and process pharmaceutical orders sent by pharmacy dispensing software.
• Automatically sending processed orders to Wholesaler APIs based on the best discounts for the products being ordered.
• A secure web portal for pharmacists and wholesalers that can review both the orders and discounts of the products, while also providing the ability for pharmacies to order directly though the web portal and to generate reports on their order history and savings over the month.

Blueberry Consultants implemented a secure and robust platform that has enabled pharmacies to get the best discounts possible within one year of the project going live. Phase I of the project went commercial ten months after the initial project was kicked off. Phase II of the project commenced directly after the successful launch, which involved an extended feature list as requested by the client.

Patrick Meehan, director of Pharmax, said: “Blueberry gave me the peace of mind to know that my project will be executed. They understood what my goals were – and delivered those goals very professionally.”

In 2017, Pharmaceutical wholesaler, United Drug, announced a €40 million investment in technology and innovation at its headquarters in Dublin. Part of this investment included buying Pharmax during the project development phase with Blueberry.

United Drug works with more than 1,800 pharmacies, hospitals, clinics and primary care centres across Ireland, and employs more than 650 staff across its four facilities in Citywest, Swords, Ballina and Limerick.

Blueberry is continuing to provide development and support for Pharmax following the buy-out by United Drug in readiness for the next chapter in the company’s growth.