Our Story

It was a typical day on the 6th of August 2021. We got a call from the authorities that a covid positive patient had visited our pharmacy 3 days ago. The Authorities asked all staff working in the last three days to isolate for 14 days. We were ordered to foot a few thousand dollars in a deep cleaning bill before reopening. It was not like we could wave a magic wand and get extra team members. We had to shut one of the pharmacies down for at least ten days.

We were expected to vaccinate the public in a closed room with no PPE. If a covid positive patient presented, the whole pharmacy team had to isolate and deep clean the pharmacy.

We had to follow some rules at that time.
Rule 1. Pharmacists were only allowed to vaccinate in a closed room in the pharmacy. We could not vaccinate outside this room.
Rule 2. We got paid a small amount of money to vaccinate a person, but the condition was that you could only claim this payment if the vaccination was done on pharmacy premises.

While isolating in early August, we thought, why don’t we vaccinate the members of the public in the empty car park at the back of our pharmacy? It will be safer for our team as patients are completing their post vaccination wait in their car. Our local Council was very supportive and permitted us. They even sent their team that built the tents to start working.

We lobbied hard to get the rules changed. They eventually got changed, but by then, it was too late. It was a chaotic experience and full of red tape.

So the tool built to allow an 11-member team to successfully vaccinate 700 cars (1000 people) was useless. We started using it for our in-store pharmacy workflow. It proved successful in managing the flow. We showed it to a few friends who wanted to use it in their pharmacies. This was how we built ConcertRx.