Hi, my name is Adrian Starzynski and I'm the creator of PharmacyList.ca
When I was consulting for an admin of a busy medical clinic, he said the staff and doctors were spending a lot of time trying to get correct pharmacy information in order to send prescriptions via Fax/other electronic methods. There was no centralized repository of pharmacies' name/address/fax number, and clinics require this information to send patients' prescriptions. The clinic also needed to enter this into their Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system so they could could continue sending prescriptions to the patient's preferred pharmacy.
Originally I entered all their local pharmacies into a list I had, however the information wasn't always correct since the staff had to rely on Google search for finding the information. As you can imagine, it was very tedious and there wasn't a central source to find any of this information. When staff was Google searching for the pharmacies, they also had to copy the name/address/fax etc. from the various websites to the clipboard so they could paste it into the EMR/fax system. None of that was user-friendly and it wasted a lot of time. Sometimes the address listed didn't match up with the actual location, so it was hard to recommend pharmacies to patients which are closest to their area.
Next, when I found out through the clinic's EMR provider that a list of pharmacies can be imported (so that users can select the preferred pharmacy for a patient through search), I immediately put all the information I had into a CSV file and sent it to the EMR provider so the pharmacies list could be populated in the EMR system so there was no need to keep searching. However, the list I tried to import (of all pharmacies in Ontario) was too large as the system could only handle about 2,000 records! The quest wasn't over so I had to find a list with pharmacies in the clinic's area. Again, there was no such list at the time so it took a very long time and I couldn't add all the pharmacies the clinic wanted (since sometimes they had patients who used a pharmacy far away i.e. at their cottage!) The clinic also had some patients who did virtual visits who were in another area of the province far from the clinic, so whenever the staff/doctors wanted to find information for the patient's pharmacy it was back to the tedious searching and manually copy/pasting everything. The clinic wanted to be able to easily send Rx's to any pharmacy in the province, and if the pharmacy wasn't in their EMR system they wanted an easy way to find the pharmacy name/address/fax # so they could send the Rx and add it to their system.
So after seeing how time-consuming and exhausting the manual work for finding pharmacies was, I setup PharmacyList.ca with all the functions the clinic's staff always wanted to make it easy to lookup pharmacies and easily import them.
I created the PharmacyList.ca site from scratch, and incorporated many features that I knew would be useful for others. For example:
I hope you will find this site useful, so that clinics and patients can quickly get the pharmacy information they need and have it at their fingertips from a single resource - PharmacyList.ca