Walgreens processes hundreds of millions of prescription dispenses a year across nearly 9,000 stores, and each transaction has hundreds of associated data points. Using Microsoft Azure Databricks, Azure Synapse Analytics, and other Azure resources, the company created an intelligent data platform that can quickly process data from prescription dispenses and create valuable insights within minutes, not only for pharmacists who are serving customers but also for operations and analytics teams across the company. This immediate access to rich transactional data and insights, whether generated 10 seconds ago or 10 years ago, changes the way that pharmacists and other decision makers use data and conduct business.
“Using Azure resources, we’ve created state-of-the-art data engineering pipelines that help us process data points from prescription transactions and create valuable insights. We can quickly push these insights back to our pharmacists and technicians.”
Sashi Venkatesan, Director of Product Engineering, Pharmacy and Healthcare Data Product Line, Walgreens
Millions of patients, hundreds of millions of prescriptions
When a patient orders a prescription at a pharmacy, it might seem like a simple transaction. But behind the scenes, multiple parties are involved, including doctors, pharmacists, insurers, and patients, and hundreds of data points are associated with every prescription dispense. For Walgreens, this process scales across nearly 9,000 stores, which filled approximately 818 million prescriptions for patients during the company’s 2020 fiscal year on an unadjusted basis.
The pharmacy chain serves approximately 8 million customers a day in the United States, with 78 percent of the population living within five miles of a Walgreens store. The chain is known for its advisory expertise and emphasis on customer convenience, but its previous back-end infrastructure couldn’t offer the reliability that the brand needs for the future.
Walgreens wanted to future-proof its infrastructure with a cloud-first approach and modern AI capabilities. So, it worked with Microsoft to build a data platform that uses Azure Databricks and other Azure services to collect meaningful data points at scale and turn them into actionable insights.
Empowering pharmacists with data
The sheer scale of the Walgreens organization had led the pharmacy chain to manage critical prescription transaction data with separate technologies for storage, processing, and delivery. This siloed approach created unnecessary complexity, costs, and extra work, and Walgreens wanted to make it easier to innovate and respond to changing customer behaviors.
“We wanted to enable an easier-to-use and more supportable platform for the enterprise from the foundation up, where intelligence is built into our systems from the start,” says Luigi Guadagno, Vice President, Pharmacy and HealthCare Platform Technology at Walgreens. “We had ambitions to power our operations in real time, optimizing our inventory based on the latest data available and understanding the next best actions for serving patients.”
The company’s goal for an intelligent, connected infrastructure was mostly driven by a need to support its pharmacists and technicians with important information about patients, such as their current conditions, medical histories, billing and insurance, and other medications they take. “Every transaction in our organization has a strong human element to it. It relies on the advisory capabilities of our pharmacists,” says Guadagno. “We knew that with a more intelligent fulfillment system, we’d be able to empower pharmacists with accurate patient insights for better healthcare outcomes.”
Critically, Walgreens wanted to help pharmacists reduce the time they spend on prescription operations and allow them to focus on spending time with the patients on the other side of the counter. But that was unachievable with an aging data platform that took up to two days to process each prescription request.
An intelligent, connected data platform
Walgreens worked with Microsoft Consulting Services and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to build its Information, Data, and Insights (IDI) platform using Azure resources. The platform has an event-based microservices architecture that processes the company’s two key prescription processes: prescription and pharmacy inventory processing and pharmacy operations processing.
Every time a prescription fulfillment is initiated, Walgreens uses Azure Databricks and Azure Synapse Analytics to move the hundreds of associated data points from each transaction through IDI. This process creates real-time, meaningful insights for its pharmacists, who access the information through dashboards and data visualizations in Power BI.
“At peak times, our platform can receive around 40,000 transactions per second,” says Sashi Venkatesan, Director of Product Engineering, Pharmacy and Healthcare Data Product Line at Walgreens. “But with Azure Databricks, we have the flexibility to scale whenever we need.”
The process is backed up by key storage and database technologies, including Azure Data Lake Storage and Azure SQL Database, and the company uses Azure Cosmos DB to run the microservices that its prescription transactions rely on. Unlike its previous platform where data from prescription dispenses took 48 hours to reach its data warehouse, Walgreens can now respond within minutes.
“With the retail and healthcare industry undergoing a tremendous change, it is imperative to provide an agile technology platform that will provide a competitive edge to the business,” says Lakshmi Nagaraj, Managing Partner at Tata Consultancy Services. “It is a great journey for TCS partnering with Walgreens and Microsoft to build a modern pharmacy platform with Azure, enabling intelligent data tools at the fingertips of the pharmacists to enable future growth.”
Greater agility, better patient engagement
Ultimately, Walgreens now can better equip its pharmacists to serve patients more effectively. “Using Azure resources, we’ve created state-of-the-art data engineering pipelines that help us process data points from prescription transactions and create valuable insights,” says Venkatesan. “We can quickly push these insights back to our pharmacists and technicians. Importantly, the insights we deliver to pharmacists are clear and informative, which means they can understand more about their patients within seconds.”
These greater insights translate to significant impacts for Walgreens patients, too. “The platform we’ve built with Azure resources is helping us empower our pharmacists and technicians,” says Guadagno. “It offers them the tools they need to effectively engage with patients, and that creates major benefits for our customer experiences.”
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“The platform we’ve built with Azure resources is helping us empower our pharmacists and technicians. It offers them the tools they need to effectively engage with patients, and that creates major benefits for our customer experiences.”
Luigi Guadagno, Vice President, Pharmacy and HealthCare Platform Technology, Walgreens
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