Most pharmacies delivering Pharmacy First consultations are doing it the hard way.

Paper intake forms. Manual eligibility checks. A separate login just to submit a claim. A pharmacist bouncing between three different systems while a queue builds at the counter.

The result? Consultations take longer than they need to, some get abandoned halfway through, and NHS revenue that should have been claimed sits uncollected at the end of every month.

Pharmacy First software exists to solve this. But the market is noisy, the terminology gets confusing fast, and picking the wrong platform creates more problems than it fixes.

This guide covers what you actually need to know: what Pharmacy First software does, how to evaluate your options properly, the real differences between Scotland and England, and what good performance looks like inside a working pharmacy.

What is Pharmacy First?

Pharmacy First is an NHS-commissioned service that lets community pharmacies deliver clinical consultations directly to patients, without a GP referral or appointment.

Scotland has offered advanced clinical pharmacy services under similar frameworks for years. In England, NHS Pharmacy First launched in February 2024, significantly expanding what community pharmacists can do. For the first time, English pharmacies were commissioned to assess and treat patients across seven specific conditions: sinusitis, sore throat, earache, infected insect bites, impetigo, shingles, and uncomplicated urinary tract infections in women.

Under both frameworks, a patient can walk in with one of the covered conditions, receive a full clinical consultation, get a prescription-only medicine where appropriate, and be referred elsewhere if needed. No GP appointment required.

Pharmacies are paid an NHS consultation fee for each completed, eligible consultation. It is a genuine new revenue stream for community pharmacy, and a meaningful way to take pressure off GP surgeries.

The opportunity is real. The operational challenge is also real, and that is where most pharmacies run into difficulty.

Why Pharmacy First creates a workflow problem

A Pharmacy First consultation looks straightforward on paper. Patient presents, pharmacist checks eligibility, a structured clinical assessment happens, a record is created, a claim goes in.

In practice, each of those steps generates friction. And friction at scale means missed revenue.

The intake problem

In many pharmacies, intake for Pharmacy First is completely manual. A staff member takes basic details on paper or verbally. The pharmacist gets called over. The consultation starts with no pre-screening and no structured record already in progress.

That means the pharmacist is doing administrative work that software could handle in seconds, asking the same questions in the same order every single time.

The claiming problem

Once a consultation is complete, there is still work to do. In Scotland, pharmacies use MYIS (Manage Your Information Scotland) to submit Pharmacy First claims to NHS Scotland. In England, claims go through NHS BSA. Either way, most pharmacies are logging into a separate system, manually entering consultation data, and hoping there are no errors that cause the claim to bounce.

At low volume, this is an inconvenience. At the volume a well-run pharmacy should be hitting, it becomes a serious operational drain and a source of claim errors that cost real money.

The visibility problem

Ask most pharmacy owners how many Pharmacy First consultations their branch completed last month. Honest answer: they are not entirely sure. Without digital tools there is no dashboard, no report, and no way to benchmark performance across sites.

For a single-site owner, that makes it hard to improve. For a group operator with multiple branches, it means managing blind.

At KinWell Pharmacy, where Cured Click was built and tested, pharmacist time spent on Pharmacy First admin was running at over 25 hours per month before digital workflows were introduced. More than half a working week, every month, lost to process rather than patient care.

What does Pharmacy First software actually do?

The best platforms do not just put a paper form on a screen. They restructure the entire consultation workflow from the moment a patient arrives to the moment the NHS claim is confirmed.

Digital consultation intake

Rather than staff collecting details verbally or on paper, digital intake lets patients begin the process through a structured interface. Online before they arrive, on a tablet in the pharmacy, or by phone.

The intake follows a standardised question pathway: presenting condition, symptom history, red flag screening, current medications, relevant medical history. Every patient with the same condition answers the same questions in the same order, every time.

Two things happen as a result. A complete, structured clinical record is created automatically with no manual data entry after the fact. And the pharmacist receives a consistent patient summary before the consultation begins, rather than starting from scratch each time.

AI triage and eligibility filtering

Not every patient who wants a Pharmacy First consultation is eligible. Some have red flag symptoms needing urgent GP or emergency referral. Some present with conditions outside the covered framework. Some are on medications that create contraindications.

A triage layer screens patients based on their intake responses. The right patients reach the pharmacist. Others are signposted appropriately. No time is wasted, and no clinical risk is introduced by a consultation that should not have happened.

Claim submission and MYIS integration

This is where most pharmacy software either falls short or handles things badly.

MYIS is the NHS Scotland system for submitting Pharmacy First claims. In England, the equivalent runs through NHS BSA. For most pharmacies today, that means completing a consultation in one system and then logging into a second one to submit the claim.

Direct integration changes this. Consultation data flows straight into the claiming system without manual re-entry. Submission time drops. Claim errors fall because there is no transcription step where data can be lost or mistyped.

Cured Click is building direct MYIS integration, so Scottish pharmacies can complete a consultation and submit the NHS claim without switching platforms. At volume, that is a significant operational advantage. You can see how this fits into the broader feature set on our features page.

Analytics and performance data

A good platform gives owners visibility they have never had before. Consultation volumes by day, week, and month. Claim rates and values. Trends over time. For groups, performance comparison across branches.

This matters at the individual practice level because you can actually see where your bottlenecks are. It matters even more at group level, where operations leads can benchmark sites against each other and identify where support is needed.

Patient communication

Digital workflows enable pre-consultation communication, letting patients know what to expect and how to prepare. Post-consultation follow-up is also possible, which improves patient experience and reduces the likelihood of someone returning with the same issue a few days later.

For pharmacies building patient loyalty alongside NHS revenue, this layer is increasingly valuable.

Multi-site management

For groups and chains, single-site software breaks down quickly. Branch managers working in isolation with no standardised workflows and no central data produce inconsistent results and make it almost impossible to manage performance at scale.

A platform built for multi-site gives a group operator one dashboard view across all branches. Consistent consultation pathways. Consistent claiming. The ability to see how each site is performing and actually act on it. If your pharmacy group needs a solution built around your specific scale and structure, get in touch with our team and we can talk through what that looks like.

Scotland vs England: does it matter which software you use?

Yes, and this is a distinction many platforms handle poorly.

The Scottish and English Pharmacy First frameworks are related but distinct. Scotland's framework is broader in scope, covers a wider range of conditions, and operates under different Patient Group Direction (PGD) arrangements than England. The clinical pathways differ. The eligibility criteria differ. The claiming systems differ.

Software built primarily for one market and extended to the other often carries the seams. Workflows designed for one set of NHS specifications that do not quite fit the other. Compliance that was accurate at launch but has not kept pace with how the service has evolved.

When you are evaluating platforms, ask directly: was this built for both markets from the start, or was one market added on later? How does the platform handle different PGD requirements? Is NHS England compliance maintained as the specification changes? Does it support MYIS integration for Scottish pharmacies?

Cured Click was built and validated inside KinWell Pharmacy in Scotland, and is actively building for full NHS England compliance as part of our current roadmap. We understand both frameworks from the inside, not from reading a specification document.

What to look for when choosing Pharmacy First software

Feature lists across the market are starting to look similar. Here is how to evaluate what actually matters.

1. Ease of use for the people using it every day

Pharmacy is a high-pressure environment. If a tool adds steps or creates confusion during a consultation, staff will not use it. They will work around it. They will go back to paper. The investment becomes worthless.

A simple test: can a pharmacist who has never seen the platform run a Pharmacy First consultation on it in their first session, without training? If not, the tool is not ready for a working pharmacy.

Ask to see the consultation workflow in a live demo, not a slide deck. Watch it move from patient intake to claim submission. Count the screens. Count the clicks. If it feels complicated in a controlled demo, it will feel worse under time pressure with a queue at the counter.

2. Built by people who actually understand pharmacy

There is a real difference between a technology company that has researched pharmacy and pharmacists who have built technology. The first produces tools that are technically competent but operationally awkward. The second produces tools that feel like they were made for how pharmacies work, because they were.

Ask who built it. Ask whether it has been tested inside a live NHS community pharmacy under real conditions. Controlled pilots are not the same as daily use in a busy dispensary.

3. NHS compliance that is current and maintained

NHS specifications change. Pharmacy First in England is still a relatively new service and the framework will evolve. The GPhC and NHS England both set standards that directly affect what compliant clinical software looks like.

Ask how the vendor handles specification updates. Can they show evidence of that process, rather than just assuring you it exists?

4. MYIS integration for Scottish pharmacies

If you are operating in Scotland, MYIS claiming is central to your Pharmacy First revenue. Time spent logging into MYIS separately, re-entering consultation data, and managing submissions manually is time that has a real cost. Direct MYIS integration should be a firm requirement, not a nice-to-have. Ask whether it exists, when it will be live, and what it looks like in practice.

5. Transparent pricing

Pharmacy software vendors have a habit of hiding pricing behind demo requests. This is a flag. A vendor that will not give you a clear model before a sales conversation has something to obscure.

Look for pricing that is tied to consultation volume rather than a flat subscription that charges you regardless of how much you use it. Per-consultation pricing means the vendor's commercial interests align with yours. See our pricing page for how we structure it.

6. Validated in a real pharmacy, not a lab

There is a meaningful difference between software tested in a live pharmacy and software built in isolation and deployed as a live trial. The latter carries risk: friction points that only show up under real conditions, workflow assumptions that do not match reality, claiming processes that break at volume.

Ask for case studies. Ask for references. Ask specifically whether the platform has been used at sustained volume, not just a short pilot.

7. Scalability from one branch to many

If you operate a single site now but plan to grow, choose software that scales. Moving platforms when you are running three sites and trying to maintain consistent workflows across all of them is painful and expensive.

How Pharmacy First software affects your revenue

The commercial case for digital Pharmacy First tools is not about technology. It is about the gap between the revenue your pharmacy should be generating and the revenue it is actually claiming.

That gap exists for two reasons.

Volume. When consultation intake is manual and admin-heavy, the number of consultations a pharmacy can realistically complete is limited by how much administrative capacity the pharmacist has. Digital intake and triage lifts that ceiling. More consultations get completed. More NHS fees get claimed.

Claim accuracy. Manual submission creates errors. Data entered incorrectly, submissions that fail, consultations that were completed but never claimed. Digital workflows with direct claiming integration bring error rates down significantly. Every eligible consultation generates a claim. Every claim is accurate.

At KinWell Pharmacy, the results of digitising the Pharmacy First workflow were:

• 96% increase in consultation volume after implementing Cured Click

• 188% year-on-year consultation growth

• £1,000+ additional revenue per month from Pharmacy First

• 25 hours of pharmacist time saved per month, returned to patient care

These are not projections. They are measured outcomes from a live NHS community pharmacy running the Cured Click platform under real operating conditions.

What good looks like: the KinWell story

KinWell Pharmacy in Scotland was one of the earliest pharmacies to use Cured Click, and it remains the real-world benchmark for what the platform can achieve.

Before Cured Click, KinWell was delivering Pharmacy First consultations the way most pharmacies do: manually, paper-based, with the pharmacist managing intake, assessment, record-keeping, and claiming across several disconnected steps. Consultation volumes were limited not by patient demand but by the operational capacity of the process.

The Cured Click team did not build the platform somewhere else and deploy it into KinWell as an experiment. They built it inside KinWell, iterating on real workflows with real patients under real NHS operating conditions. The result is a tool shaped by the friction points that actually exist in community pharmacy.

After full implementation, KinWell's consultation numbers increased by 96%. Year-on-year, volume grew by 188%. Monthly revenue from Pharmacy First increased by more than £1,000. And the team recovered 25 hours per month that had been lost to admin.

In 2025, Cured Click won the Scottish Pharmacy Awards, recognition from the pharmacy sector itself.

Frequently asked questions

What is Pharmacy First software? Pharmacy First software is a digital platform that manages NHS Pharmacy First consultations end-to-end, from patient intake and eligibility screening through to clinical assessment, record-keeping, and NHS claim submission. It replaces manual, paper-based processes with structured digital workflows built around how pharmacies actually operate.

Do I need special software to deliver Pharmacy First? There is no legal requirement for dedicated software. Pharmacies can use paper-based systems or existing PMR tools for record-keeping. In practice, without structured digital workflows, most pharmacies find that consultation volumes are capped by admin capacity, claim errors increase, and pharmacist time gets consumed by process. The commercial case for dedicated software is strong for any pharmacy treating Pharmacy First as a serious revenue stream.

How does Pharmacy First software integrate with MYIS? MYIS is the NHS Scotland system for submitting Pharmacy First claims. Most pharmacy software requires pharmacists to log into MYIS separately and enter consultation data manually after each consultation. Cured Click is building direct MYIS integration so claims can be submitted from within the platform, removing the separate login and cutting claim error rates significantly.

Is Pharmacy First software different in Scotland and England? Yes. The two frameworks have different clinical pathways, covered conditions, PGD arrangements, and claiming systems. Software built primarily for one market does not always translate cleanly to the other. When evaluating platforms, ask specifically whether it meets the relevant NHS specifications for your market and how compliance is maintained as the service evolves.

How much does Pharmacy First software cost? Pricing models vary across the market. Cured Click operates on a per-consultation model, with volume incentives above a threshold. That means the cost scales with the revenue it generates, rather than charging a flat fee regardless of usage. Full details are on our pricing page.

Can Pharmacy First software work across multiple branches? Yes. For groups and chains, multi-site management is one of the most valuable capabilities a platform can offer. Cured Click supports centralised oversight, consistent workflows, and performance benchmarking across branches. If you are operating at scale and want to talk through a bespoke solution, contact our team.

Ready to get started?

If your pharmacy is running Pharmacy First consultations without a structured digital workflow, the gap between your current performance and what is possible is probably larger than you think.

For independent pharmacies: Cured Click is free to get started. Create your free page at curedclick.com, set up in minutes, and start running structured digital consultations today.

For pharmacy groups and chains: If you operate multiple sites and need a solution built around your specific workflows, volume, and compliance requirements, our team works with you directly. Get in touch and we will put together something that fits.