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.

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 GENie, Inc., for example, as part of our efforts to build a new service model that will realize last-mile distribution.

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, 20 pharmacies have received authorization as pharmacies linked with local communities^※3 and three 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 to provide primarily visiting care and other at-home services; and S-Care Mate Co., Ltd., which provides primarily facility-based services in the Tokyo metropolitan area and Chubu region at 23 business locations and 51 service centers.

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.

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 Smart Shopping Co., Ltd.’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.