In 2017 our Founders Mark Hedley and Kevin Murphy identified the urgent need to adapt their pharmacy group business to anticipated changes in the UK community pharmacy sector. Their consultancy work on a range of innovative and disruptive healthcare projects had given the pair a unique insight into the direction of travel for healthcare sector. They identified the increasing importance of convenience as well as a need to find efficiencies to cope with significantly reduced funding. Market research identified trends in customer behaviour towards convenience, distance selling & app-based competitors as a major threat going forward

“While we had a loyal customer base and our business was growing, we recognised that complacency was dangerous and decided we needed to innovate in order to mitigate the threat from online competitors and huge changes in NHS funding. We identified that the main reason patients would choose distance selling or 100 hour pharmacies was convenience of access”

Kevin Murphy

Automated prescription collection was an attractive concept to increase convenience but, underwhelmed by existing products functional limitations and high cost, they resolved to develop a more cost-efficient solution better suited to the UK market.

“We couldn’t find any solution internationally that met the needs of the UK market in terms of safety, efficiency and return on investment so we resolved to develop that solution ourselves ”

Mark Hedley

After 12 months of painstaking development with a UK manufacturing partner, the result of this journey was the installation of the first UK manufactured pharmacy automation “the MedPoint” in January 2019.

This was very well received by patients which in turn resulted in significant growth in prescription and retails sales. The experience and strong interest at the Pharmacy Show Exhibition in October 2019 spurred the company on to scale-up production to supply the wider market with the support of Scottish Enterprise, and InnovateUK.

The arrival of Covid19 highlighted further the need for innovation in service delivery and accelerated demand leading the company to rapidly develop the UKs first completely freestanding temperature controlled collection point which can be deployed rapidly and in any location to relieve pressure on the health system.

This innovation led MedPoint to be selected out of a record 20,000 applications for  Business Led Innovation in response to global disruption grant competition which was announced by the UK government to support UK businesses to focus on emerging or increasing needs of society and industries during and following the Covid-19 pandemic.

The senior team has since been strengthened by manufacturing, pharmacy automation and project management expertise in the form of Richard Morgan-Green and Colin Simpson as well as a range of key partners that have enabled the company to scale-up at pace to meet the needs of our customers.