PharmacyWire provides an API that we call XMLConnect to provide all external integration capabilities. This API is used for prescription transfers, order placement, interaction checking, customer profile management, order tracking, product catalog management, and many other requirements. For our clients, we provide extensive documentation for the API, and include integration assistance with our standard licensing fees. The API is typically used in two contexts:
- Pharmacy to pharmacy order and prescription transfers, and;
- Website integration for online customer order processing.
Implementing and integrating the XMLConnect API into a website can be a time consuming process, especially for new clients. To allow customers to rapidly implement new websites and minimize the development time, Metrex created a plugin for using on WordPress websites. WordPress is the most widely used online publishing framework, and is recognized as being SEO friendly and easy to use and manage.
The features of this system are as follows:
- Automatic integration of the PharmacyWire product catalog, with appropriate controls around availability of prescription and non-prescription drugs as well as controlled substances and nonexportable drugs.
- Secure creation of customer accounts and recording of credit cards such that no user or credit card information is retained on the WordPress site
- Full shopping cart and checkout process without needing any additional client side coding, including VISA and MasterCard credit card processing of orders (charged when goods are shipped)
- Customers are able to create and edit their account information, including shipping and billing addresses.
- Ability to heavily customize the visual layout of the site and search results
- Integrated search engine rapidly searches on available drug name, drug package, drug family and ingredients to find best results available
- Allows customers to login and re-order any products previously ordered
- Upload of electronic prescription documents
- Ability to overload search results such that links to automatically built drug pages can be replaced with custom pages that have been tailored for SEO purposes
The WordPress plugin is also constantly being extended to add new capabilities, many of which are used on a website with a simple “shortcode” embedded in the HTML. This makes it easy for site developers to incorporate features without needing to do any custom coding at all. For example, to show a list of all cholesterol drugs on a page, the tag [PharmacyWire condition=”cholesterol”] is embedded in the HTML for the given page.
As the plugin was developed specifically for WordPress, this also means that an extensive list of third party plugins for WordPress will work side-by-side with the PharmacyWire plugin. For example, social media integration can easily be added to your site, as well as slideshows, blogging, mailing lists, and even polls – all tools to help engage visitors and bring them back for ongoing updates.
As this plugin is specific to the PharmacyWire online pharmacy management solution, and your pharmacy needs to be operating PharmacyWire in order to use this plugin, and the plugin is only available to clients of PharmacyWire. If you would like to obtain the plugin for that purpose, please contact Metrex for more information, or visit the following pages.
Metrex also provides ongoing template development to optimize the use of this plugin. Please contact us if you want us to work with you on integrating your website with PharmacyWire using your existing designs, or to review our templates, or for us to create a new custom design for you.
