Australia key to MedAdvisor’s future
AUSTRALIAN pharmacy software provider, MedAdvisor, will retain a local focus despite the growth of its business in the US, the company’s Managing Director, Robert Read, insists.
With close to 75% of MedAdvisor’s $38.8 million in revenue the 2021 financial year coming from the US, Read told Pharmacy Daily that the Australian pharmacy market remained strategically important to the company going forward.
“One of the things people say, ‘look are you going to forget about the Australian market and invest solely in the US?’” he said.
“Absolutely not, Australia is, if you think about it in terms of high altitude training, it’s a highly regulated, highly fragmented [and] relatively small market,” he said.
“So if you can make it work and get it right here, in this context, it has much greater applicability in other markets.
“This is absolutely the place where we want to refine, improve and innovate first.”
Read said the business had “evolved pretty significantly” over the last 18 months, with the acquisition of Adheris Health (PD 19 Nov 2020) providing greater insight into “the global dynamics around pharmacy, which can also be quite informative for product development and innovation in the Australian context”.
Read noted that more than 4,000 pharmacies in Australia were using MedAdvisor as of 30 Sep, an increase of more than 300 stores compared with the end of the fourth quarter of FT21, while patient numbers had jumped by 300,000, to 2.3 million, in the same period.
“I think there’s a combination of factors that really come in to help drive that [growth],” he said.
“We’re well known for our ability to link patients in with their local pharmacy, give that pharmacy a digital frontdoor, and we’ve been good at that over many years.
“What more and more pharmacies are realising is the sophistication of our workflow that supports everything from COVID bookings to health services that can be provided, and are provided, whether it be through government, industry, insurers or others, they can come through our platform and do it in a really automated way.
“We’re taking a lot of the burden away from pharmacists and that makes the services more accessible and when you make it more accessible, we’ve found that pharmacists want to do more and more of them because they can see the value that it has for patients, and they can see the revenue that comes through from it.
“We spend a lot of time trying to think through how do you make a pharmacist’s life easier, and what steps can we take out from their workflow that they’re doing today.”