Pharmacy has not traditionally been the first choice for pharmaceutical companies looking to improve their engagement and provide valuable educational awareness to patients and communities. Instead, they prefer to use internal Nurse-led and other Allied Health-led Patient Engagement Programs, with Pharmacy as a possible referral source.

This landscape, however, is rapidly changing, with COVID-19 only exacerbating the need to connect digitally with patients after they leave the healthcare setting. In the Australian healthcare setting, clinical programme implementation has also been complex. Many individual ownership structures and banner groups provide different workflow procedures, leaving pharmaceutical companies without the certainty of standardisation required for long-term programme implementation.

In addition to these structural challenges, the rapid clinical transaction turnover in community pharmacy, i.e., prescription review, prescription checking, and direct patient-facing interactions, complicates matters. With the average task taking one to two minutes, programmes looking to integrate into such a dynamic workflow environment must consider behavioural change a prerequisite to successful programme outcomes. However, with the advent of digital, the opportunity to leverage community pharmacy's latent capacity has never been greater. "Give us the tools, and we will finish the job," Winston Churchill once said.

The Pharmacy Guild of Australia reported approximately 350 million individual patient visits to pharmacies in Australia each year. With the average Australian visiting a pharmacy 14 times per year (digitally or in-person), pharmacists have a unique opportunity to have a meaningful impact on patient outcomes throughout their health journey. Churchill's "tools," which are outfitted with digital CRM patient engagement software, provide these professionals with real-time and historical data that is tailored to the patient. Armed with this consolidated patient information and enhanced by AI systems, pharmacists can identify potential issues at the point of care or prescription dispensing event and then intervene for better patient care.

While still subject to TGA regulations, pharmaceutical companies could now raise disease awareness directly through the pharmacy channel, providing pharmacists with a meaningful opportunity to improve care. As a result, Pharmacy may be regarded as the logical choice for addressing multibillion-dollar issues ranging from medication adherence to clinical trial participation.

Pharmacists can target and deliver personalised communications by connecting Electronic Health Records, specialist CRMs, and healthcare patient apps that offer services ranging from consultations to prescriptions to patient adherence functionality. To personalise patient engagement, additional SMS, e-mail, and point-of-contact interventions can be used. With the rise of AI-enabled health platforms, healthcare brands can use such platforms/apps for disease education, a crucial patient engagement tool for pharmaceutical companies.