Elly Yates-Roberts |
US pharmacy chain Walgreens has completed a project with Microsoft and Tata Consultancy Services to build a platform to gain insights from prescription dispensing data, freeing up pharmacists to spend more time helping patients.
Walgreens serves more than 60 million patients in the US. To future-proof its infrastructure with a cloud-first approach and artificial intelligence, it built a data platform that uses Azure Databricks and other Azure services to collect meaningful data points and turn them into actionable insights.
“We wanted to enable an easier-to-use and more supportable platform for the enterprise from the foundation up, where intelligence is built into our systems from the start,” said Luigi Guadagno, vice president of pharmacy and healthcare platform technology at Walgreens. “We had ambitions to power our operations in real time, optimising our inventory based on the latest data available and understanding the next best actions for serving patients.”
The firm also wanted to support its pharmacists with important information about patients, such as their conditions, medical histories, billing and insurance. “We knew that with a more intelligent fulfilment system, we’d be able to empower pharmacists with accurate patient insights for better healthcare outcomes,” said Guadagno.
With its Information, Data, and Insights platform, Walgreens can help pharmacists reduce the time they spend on prescription operations and allow them to focus on spending time with the patients.
“The platform we’ve built with Azure resources is helping us empower our pharmacists and technicians,” said Guadagno. “It offers them the tools they need to effectively engage with patients, and that creates major benefits for our customer experiences.”