2021 marks Phlo’s second year as a digital pharmacy and we can’t believe how much we’ve grown over the past two years. The COVID pandemic accelerated the need for digital healthcare services like Phlo, and our focus remained on building an outstanding patient experience underpinned by great patient care, great engineering and great design.
Here are just some of the key achievements and milestones that we achieved in 2021:
When Phlo initially launched in 2020, we decided to build Phlo Digital Pharmacy as a web app that was easily accessible to everyone. The next stage was to launch our native mobile apps in the Apple App Store and Google Play, providing patients with a choice of their preferred platform to manage their medication. We wanted to ensure that our mobile apps offered the same ease-of-use and patient experience that our patients were used to. Our team worked incredibly hard to build, iterate and test the apps with our patients before general release. A massive thank you to our patients for helping us with this process.
In August this year, we were delighted to launch our mobile apps on Apple and Android, available on both mobile or tablet devices.
The mobile apps are easy-to-use. Download from the app store or google play and login using your NHS login or Phlo login details, then request and order your medication as usual.
Our feedback on the app has been excellent, and our team listen to every piece of feedback so we can continuously optimise and improve our apps.
Following the success of our same-day medication delivery service in London, we launched our second same-day pharmacy delivery hub in Birmingham at the end of July. This means that we can now offer our patients in Birmingham same-day delivery of acute and repeat prescriptions in under four hours. Same-day Birmingham patients also receive regular updates and live tracking, as they do in London, offering patients a safe and reliable pharmacy experience.
This was a significant milestone for us as a company, and we are delighted to have grown our patient base substantially in Birmingham since we launched, and we are busier than we have ever been!
Launching our Birmingham same-day pharmacy hub, our first city outside of London, marks the first of many city hubs we plan to roll out across England in 2022 and beyond.
We were delighted to announce that we have launched our B2B2C offering, Phlo Connect– an API-driven pharmacy infrastructure platform that delivers a first-class end-to-end digital patient experience for private and NHS healthcare providers.
Phlo Connect allows forward-looking healthcare companies to seamlessly integrate with our digital pharmacy infrastructure to offer their patients a convenient, safe, and reliable way to access their medication. It also significantly reduces the administrative burden of paper prescribing on clinical teams and helps our healthcare partners to offer their patients an end-to-end digital patient experience.
We are so proud to say that we are already working with some of the UK’s leading healthcare companies, including Babylon Health, Skindoc, and HealthHero, to name just a few.
We can’t wait to build on our initial offering and continue to develop the next generation of pharmacy infrastructure in the UK healthcare sector.
You can find out more about Phlo Connect here: www.phloconnect.com
In September this year, we were delighted to announce the integration of NHS login to our web and mobile apps. This makes the Phlo app easier for existing patients and provides a more straightforward registration process for new patients with one less password to remember.
NHS login is a service provided by the NHS that allows you to access many different healthcare websites and apps with one set of login credentials. It's an effortless way to manage and access your healthcare information in one place securely. It also means that we can provide our patients with an even faster service. We can integrate directly with GP systems to process patient medication requests and liaise directly with GP’s.
Find out more about the benefits of NHS login here
In 2021, we serviced over 11,000 patients, delivering over 30,000 medication orders to our patients. Our quickest delivery time was just 27 minutes, with our oldest patient being 100 years old and our youngest patient just 1.
In 2021, we doubled the size of our workforce at Phlo. We now have over 50 employees working across pharmacy, engineering, design, marketing, product, and business support teams across London, Birmingham and Glasgow.
Maintaining our team culture of collaboration and innovation is so important to us. The people we hire share the same ethos and are passionate about building the future of healthcare. We’ve also put in place several new employee benefits this year to continue to make Phlo a wonderful place to work.
Within our team this year we have also celebrated marriages, new-borns, expectant parents and engagements. We would like to thank all of our employees for their incredible hard work this year and a very relaxing break over the festive season.
Patient feedback is so important to us. It helps us to keep improving our service to make it as easy as possible for our patients to manage their medication. In 2021, we are proud to have achieved an average 4.9/5 stars on Trustpilot and some fantastic patient reviews.
Here are some highlights of our annual NHS patient survey in 2021 conducted in July:
We have now finished our accelerator programme with Digital Health London, and it has been fantastic.
We have learned so much as a team from the programme and fostered some incredible connections and relationships. There is some fantastic progress being made in the UK digital healthcare space, and we are excited to be part of that moving forward.
A special thank you goes to our programme coordinator Ruth Bradbury who helped us gain an incredible amount of insight and knowledge from the accelerator programme.
You can find out more about the prestigious programme here.
This is just a snapshot of what we have achieved at Phlo over the last 12 months. It has been a year of incredible growth and learning, and we cannot wait to continue helping more patients access their medication and developing our product/services in 2022 and beyond.
From everyone at Phlo we’d like to thank our patients for placing their trust in us to be your Pharmacy. We will never take this for granted, without the faith you’ve shown in us we wouldn’t have been able to achieve anything in this article.
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