How a new approach to remote payments boosted productivity & profits for My Compounding Pharmacy  

From its base in Roselands, New South Wales, My Compounding Pharmacy offers one of Australia’s largest range of medicines. Pharmacist and owner George El-Azzi works in the onsite lab, compounding and filling scripts for patients across Australia.

George says My Compounding Pharmacy’s customers “require specialised medications or premium vitamins that are not usually sourced at your regular pharmacy”. This means the pharmacy receives prescriptions from customers in all locations and must take payments even when they aren’t in store.

Overcoming remote payments challenges

George explains that, given rising demand and high script volumes—and a need to support older customers and those with limited mobility—his team has been handling many payments over the phone. He says, “It was quite time consuming having to enter in every person’s card details into the EFTPOS payment machine”. 

There were also times when incorrect numbers were given, or some customers were hesitant to provide card details aloud. Putting it simply, George says, “It was taking too much time, it was quite costly, and didn’t provide a secure method of pay.”

My Compounding Pharmacy implemented CommBank’s Smart Health for Pharmacy solution to address these issues. This provided a single platform to take payments in store and remotely through Scrypt.Pay, integrated with the pharmacy’s existing point of sale (POS) system.

According to George, the setup was simple. The integration with their POS was smooth and completed within 15 minutes¹, and the CommBank team were “easy to work with and very supportive”.

Increasing reach while reducing risk

With Smart Health for Pharmacy, George can now send a payment link to any customer. They could “use the link to pay instantly and on their own time, even in a busy work environment,” George says. “it’s an easier process, and it reduces the risk of entering and holding patients’ data.”

“Before, customers didn’t want to pay over the phone and would have to come into the pharmacy. This has made it easier to process payments and home deliver the medication.”

“When using the solution, our POS system Z Software could notify us of payment receipt via email , so we didn’t need to manually check, and we’d start supplying medication within an hour. It allowed us to reduce time with the customer, improve workflow and also increase profitability via capturing payments from all over Australia.”

The response from customers was also overwhelmingly positive. George says that once people had used the remote payment method, they would say, “This is so easy for us, this is flawless, please send me the link all the time.”

Driving team productivity 

George says My Compounding Pharmacy has harnessed Smart Health for Pharmacy to streamline remote deliveries. According to George, the solution has “reduced the ordering queues in the business and freed up the team’s time.” 

My Compounding Pharmacy has seen productivity improve since using Smart Health for Pharmacy. “We’ve noticed that staff are a lot more efficient because they no longer have to manually handle payments and can focus on other things within the pharmacy”.

“We would recommend Smart Health for other pharmacies because it reduces the need for more staff and allows you to scale. I find our staff are a lot more productive, so it's impacted our businesses in a positive way.”

For George, these efficiencies are an added benefit of the solution on top of improved sales performance. “It basically means more customers and more profit, which is why Smart Health for Pharmacy is our payment method of choice. ”