Introduction
Over the past five years, pharmacy stores in the US have seen YoY growth of 2.6%. This has led to an escalated demand for pharmacists. Employment agencies have not been successful in meeting these demands. When it comes to finding quick shift coverage, it takes them days and sometimes weeks. Also, they overcharge the pharmacy owners and underpay pharmacist for their work.
Fill-in-Rx, wanted to build a marketplace that connects pharmacies and pharmacists. I wanted to fill the gap between pharmacies who are looking for shift coverage and pharmacist who are looking for job opportunities. It also helps Pharmacists to pick up additional shifts in their free time.
Agile way to deliver the product
The primary goal of Fill-In-Rx was to create a simple tool that would help pharmacies find staff on-demand as well as for the near future needs. We had to make sure that user experience is designed in a way that Pharmacy owners can easily approach multiple candidates and choose the best suitable one without having a call or in person meeting. Thus involving users and getting their feedback was very important.
We followed agile development method to build the platform with monthly sprint approach so that clients can get feedback from real pharmacy owners and pharmacists on what is built. The development process in agile started with the most basic set of deliverables, followed by planning, implementing and testing the next set of features in subsequent iterations thus increasing the agility of the development team.