Community Healthcare and Nursing Care Support Business

Utilizing our network with medical institutions, we provide a comprehensive range of pharmacy and nursing care services that solve local medical and nursing care issues and contribute to the improvement and maintenance of the quality of life of local people.

With the goal of building a common Group brand nationwide, we absorbed Pfercos Co., Ltd. and Mick Co., Ltd. and established UNISMILE Co., Ltd. in April 2022. We are striving to strengthen synergies with the other businesses in the Group.

We are unifying systems across all Group pharmacies, standardizing back-office functions, and moving forward with a Group restructuring. We are also striving to improve productivity and profitability and strengthen our business platform in other ways as well, such as by revising the day-to-day work performed by pharmacists and introducing devices to aid compounding.

As part of this initiative, we have introduced COLLABO Mobile, which comes standard with the functions of COLLABO Portal, across our Group’s pharmacies. The availability of digital services in home medical and nursing care settings has enabled pharmacists to provide timely information to doctors about symptoms identified through interactions with patients. This technology also helps improve patient engagement and operational efficiency through online medication guidance. In the future, we plan to develop in-app content as a tool to support the operations of community pharmacies.

Moreover, we are striving to further enhance customer convenience by offering, for example, online medication instruction, electronic prescriptions, and home delivery of pharmaceuticals, as we move forward with building our Group brand of safe and secure pharmacies.

We are working to lower pharmaceutical waste and optimize inventory by using an inventory management system to control inventories of slow-moving products and implementing the Cubixx (pharmacy version) traceability system for specialty drugs that the Suzuken Group is promoting.

As an initiative done in partnership with the Suzuken Group’s nursing care businesses, we are using Medical Care Station (MCS), an SNS operated by Group member Embrace Co., Ltd. for medical and nursing care professionals, to promote communication in communities. By participating in cooperation opportunities among community members in diverse professions through the Group’s partnership initiatives, we are meeting pharmacy patients’ needs for nursing care services and advice as well as educating employees, among other things. Furthermore, we are starting demonstrations of our same-day drug delivery service with our partner company COCONET CO., LTD. for example, as part of our efforts to build a new service model that will realize last-mile distribution.

In our pharmacy business, we are proactively incorporating DX to reform pharmacy operations and strengthen points of contact with patients, thereby enriching the functions of family pharmacies and pharmacists. We supply all the pharmacists in our Group pharmacies with COLLABO Mobile devices, which come installed with COLLABO Portal functions. We also deploy a patient follow-up system via LINE that utilizes the services of KAKEHASHI to support pharmacy DX. Through these and other initiatives, we will realize bidirectional communication with customers using digital means, as we strive for a new vision of pharmacies that contribute to their communities.

As a key element of comprehensive community care systems, we partner with local healthcare professionals and long-term care providers, thereby reducing burdens on patients and their families and building mechanisms that help them to live safely and securely.

To serve the needs of patients receiving treatment for cancer or other diseases at home, we are opening pharmacies with sterile drug preparation rooms as well as having all pharmacies offer visits to provide medication instruction in patients’ homes. Under the system of authorizing pharmacies by function, which we started in 2021, 35 pharmacies have received authorization as pharmacies linked with local communities^※3 and 3 as pharmacies linked with medical institutions.^※4 These are some of the ways that we are implementing community-based healthcare collaboration.

We are operating our nursing care business through Sanki Wellbe Co., Ltd., which operates 74 business locations and 134 service centers in the Chugoku region, focusing on visiting care and other at-home services. Meanwhile, S-Care Mate Co., Ltd. provides primarily facility-based services at 23 business locations and 51 service centers in the Tokyo metropolitan area and Chubu region.

We are providing a full, wide-ranging lineup of nursing care services, from home-based to residential-type services, according to users’ needs for support and nursing care as well as to changes in those needs.

Maintaining sufficient staffing of long-term care workers has become an urgent matter.

In response, our long-term care companies are taking steps, such as establishing systems for earning professional qualifications, to improve employee satisfaction, and are adopting robotic, fall-prevention, and other technologies to help staff members perform their jobs.

In our nursing care business, we are working to secure human resources by preventing staff turnover and to improve their rate of operations. We have also started a proof of concept (PoC) with our partner ai6 for a monitoring service using Wi-Fi sensing technology, as we work to develop solutions that will balance increasing customer satisfaction with reducing workloads.

We build relationships with the community by helping users to participate in their community associations or hosting events where they can interact with local residents.

In the Group’s nursing care business, we are strengthening our integrated Group approach to community-based healthcare and nursing care collaboration. By creating an information linkage between sales representatives known as marketing specialists (MS) and pharmacists using Medical Care Station (MCS), an SNS provided by Group member Embrace Co., Ltd. for medical and long-term care professionals, we are helping to enrich users’ healthcare and nursing care services by sharing community information and offering prior consultation about nursing care services to patients who use pharmacies, among other services. We will roll this out as a tool to link people in various professions in the community, including users. We are also moving forward on initiatives in last-mile distribution, such as automated ordering of nursing care items utilizing S-Mat, Inc.’s inventory management automation IoT device, SmartMat.

Operation of a comprehensive distribution business for care-tech businesses was established, including a welfare equipment rental service business. We aim to further contribute to community healthcare and nursing care.

In the nursing care division, we are working to secure a stable workforce and improve the utilization rate of our nursing care facilities. We are also making efforts to improve productivity by introducing care-tech solutions and expanding their distribution, primarily through Medicare Collabo CO., LTD., a joint venture with Yagami Co., Ltd. Through the active use of ICT, we strive to achieve digital transformation in nursing care. Furthermore, by leveraging the Group’s strengths, namely our strong ties with pharmaceutical companies, we are committed to creating a community-wide nursing care ecosystem in which nursing care facilities, medical institutions, and local governments work together to support each other, through initiatives such as promoting vaccinations for the elderly.