The Pharmacy Counter Is Changing. Is the Technology Behind It Keeping Up?

How the evolution of community pharmacy is reshaping the technology infrastructure at the point of service

HiStone | Global Retail & Healthcare Technology Perspective

For decades, the pharmacy counter had a relatively straightforward role: process a prescription, complete a transaction and keep the queue moving.

That model is changing.

Across markets, community pharmacies are evolving into more complex service environments. They still dispense medicines and sell everyday health and wellness products, but increasingly they are also becoming destinations for consultations, vaccinations, screenings, preventive services and other forms of accessible healthcare.

At the same time, customers bring expectations shaped far beyond healthcare. They expect speed. They expect digital convenience. They expect consistent experiences across physical and online channels. And they have little patience for technology that makes a simple interaction unnecessarily complicated.

For pharmacy operators, that creates an important challenge: how do you add more services and more digital capability without adding more friction to the pharmacy itself?

Increasingly, part of the answer starts with technology that rarely attracts much attention - the infrastructure at the point of service.

A global shift in the role of the pharmacy

The transformation is taking different forms from market to market, but the direction is increasingly familiar.

Community pharmacies are moving beyond their traditional role as a place primarily associated with dispensing medicines. Across mature and developing healthcare markets, pharmacies are becoming more closely integrated into everyday healthcare delivery while continuing to operate highly demanding retail environments.

The scale alone makes this transformation significant.

In England, for example, community pharmacies dispensed approximately 1.16 billion prescription items in 2024/25, 4% more than the previous year, with 97% processed through the Electronic Prescription Service.

But dispensing is only part of the story.

Under the NHS Pharmacy First programme, pharmacies have taken on a larger frontline healthcare role, providing consultations and treatment for common conditions that previously might have required a GP appointment. Between March 2025 and February 2026, more than 3.3 million Pharmacy First consultations were delivered.

Internationally, the broader direction is equally important. The World Pharmacy Council increasingly describes community pharmacy as critical healthcare infrastructure, reflecting its wider contribution to accessible, sustainable healthcare systems.

For operators, this evolution has practical consequences.

A modern pharmacy may need to accommodate prescription collection, healthcare consultations, OTC and retail transactions, loyalty programmes, digital prescriptions, payments, inventory workflows and connected patient services - sometimes within the same relatively small footprint.

Technology has to support that complexity without making it visible to the customer.

Convenience has become part of healthcare

There is another force reshaping pharmacy: consumer behaviour.

Healthcare is no longer isolated from the expectations people have developed elsewhere in their lives.

Consumers who can order groceries from a phone, check into a flight digitally and receive a purchase the same day naturally begin to expect comparable simplicity when accessing healthcare.

Research into changing pharmacy behaviour has pointed to convenience as an important factor influencing how consumers choose where and how to access pharmacy services. At the same time, customers are increasingly receptive to pharmacies offering services beyond traditional dispensing.

The competitive question therefore changes.

It is no longer simply: Where will customers fill their prescriptions?

It increasingly becomes: Where can they manage their health needs most conveniently?

For physical pharmacies, this is potentially an advantage. Few purely digital alternatives can replicate the combination of immediate access, professional advice, local presence and human interaction that a community pharmacy can provide.

But the physical experience has to work.

Long queues, fragmented systems, cluttered counters and slow transactions undermine precisely the convenience that gives the local pharmacy its advantage.

The POS is becoming infrastructure, not simply a till

This is where the role of point-of-sale technology deserves reconsideration.

Traditionally, the POS terminal sat at the end of the customer journey. Its job was largely transactional.

Today, it sits at the intersection of a much larger technology environment.

Depending on the pharmacy and its software ecosystem, the point of service may connect with payment systems, stock management, loyalty programmes, customer displays, barcode scanning, receipt printing and other applications.

That changes the criteria for selecting hardware.

Processing performance remains important, but so do reliability, connectivity, physical footprint, ergonomics, peripheral integration, operating-system flexibility and lifecycle consistency.

For a single independent pharmacy, poor hardware can mean an inconvenient interruption.

Across a pharmacy group operating dozens or hundreds of locations, the same issue becomes an operational problem at scale.

And as pharmacies devote more of their teams' time to patient-facing services, there is another consideration: technology should consume less attention, not more of it.

Every unnecessary device, cable, workaround or manual process adds complexity to an environment where staff time is becoming increasingly valuable.

From technology accumulation to technology simplification

For years, digitization often meant adding another device.

A payment terminal. A scanner. Another display. Another application. Another piece of hardware occupying valuable counter space.

The next stage of pharmacy technology is likely to be less about adding technology and more about integrating it intelligently.

That is particularly important in pharmacies, where space has unusual value. The counter must accommodate transactions while preserving visibility, accessibility and room for meaningful interaction between staff and customers.

This is driving interest in more integrated All-in-One POS architectures.

A modern terminal can consolidate core computing and touchscreen functionality into a smaller footprint while supporting additional displays and peripherals according to the requirements of each pharmacy.

The benefit is not simply aesthetic.

Fewer fragmented components can mean a cleaner installation, easier deployment across multiple locations, more consistent configurations and a service point that can evolve without repeatedly redesigning the counter.

One pharmacy network, different customer journeys

There is also no longer one universal pharmacy checkout.

Consider the variety of interactions that can happen within the same location.

One customer may be collecting a prescription. Another is purchasing several health and beauty products. Another needs advice from a pharmacist. Another has come for a clinical service. Another simply wants to pay quickly and leave.

Technology architecture increasingly needs to accommodate these different journeys.

That makes flexibility strategically important.

Some pharmacies may favour a conventional staff-operated POS. Others may introduce customer-facing displays or additional digital interaction. Larger formats may explore self-service for appropriate retail transactions while preserving pharmacist interaction where professional care is required.

The most useful technology platforms are therefore not necessarily those designed around a single fixed checkout format, but those capable of adapting as the pharmacy's service model changes.

What should pharmacy operators look for?

When evaluating the next generation of POS infrastructure, the conversation should move beyond processor specifications and screen sizes.

The more important questions are operational.

• Can the platform integrate with the pharmacy's existing software environment?

• Does it provide sufficient connectivity for the peripherals required today - and potentially tomorrow?

• Can configurations be standardized across multiple locations?

• Can the installation remain clean as additional functionality is introduced?

• Is the hardware appropriate for long operating hours?

• Can the same platform accommodate different counter designs and customer journeys?

• And critically: will the technology make life easier for pharmacy teams, or simply give them another system to manage?

  
  

Those questions become increasingly important as pharmacy evolves from a primarily transactional environment into a combination of retail, healthcare and digital service delivery.

From the UK pharmacy counter to a global technology requirement

For HiStone, pharmacy is already a real-world example of how these requirements are reshaping POS hardware.

The HiStone LUNA X (HK568) has become a popular All-in-One POS choice for pharmacy deployments in the UK. But the requirements behind that adoption are not uniquely British.

Space efficiency. Flexible integration. Reliable commercial operation. Compatibility with different software environments. The ability to standardize hardware across multiple locations. A service point that remains clean and approachable for both employees and customers.

These are increasingly universal requirements for pharmacy operators.

LUNA X was developed around that flexibility. The platform combines a 15.6-inch Full HD touchscreen with an adjustable and rotatable display architecture. Windows, Linux and Android configurations allow the same hardware family to support different software environments, while optional 10.1-inch or 15.6-inch customer-facing displays provide additional flexibility at the point of service.

The display can be positioned for the operator, turned towards the customer or rotated into portrait mode for assisted and self-service scenarios. Optional CUBE X integration can also bring receipt printing, 2D barcode scanning and audio into a more consolidated checkout configuration.

Yet for pharmacy operators, the significance is not any individual specification.

It is the principle behind the architecture: one adaptable commercial hardware platform supporting different software, service and deployment requirements.

For an independent pharmacy, that can mean a cleaner and more flexible point of service.

For a pharmacy group operating across dozens or hundreds of locations, it can mean something more strategic: greater consistency in deployment, support and future technology planning.

And those requirements are not confined to one market.

Whether the pharmacy is in London, Madrid, Dubai, Singapore, Mexico City or elsewhere, the underlying challenge is increasingly similar - supporting a more sophisticated pharmacy operation without allowing the technology environment to become more complicated with it.

The best pharmacy technology may be the technology customers barely notice

The pharmacy of the future is often portrayed through artificial intelligence, automation, robotics and digital health.

All of those technologies will play a role.

But transformation also depends on something less dramatic: removing friction from thousands of everyday interactions.

A customer should not have to think about the technology being used when collecting medicine or making a purchase. A pharmacist should not have to fight with hardware while trying to focus on a patient. And an operator should not need an increasingly complicated technology estate simply because the pharmacy is offering more services.

The strongest infrastructure works quietly in the background.

As pharmacies take on a larger role in healthcare, that may become the most important technology principle of all:

The more sophisticated the pharmacy becomes, the simpler the experience should feel.

Modernizing pharmacy technology across your business?

The right POS strategy is about more than replacing hardware. It is an opportunity to simplify operations, standardize infrastructure across locations and create a technology foundation that can support new services as the pharmacy evolves.

Speak with HiStone about how the right POS architecture can support your next pharmacy modernization or rollout 

Follow the link for more details: LUNA X (HK568)

Selected Sources

NHS Business Services Authority. General Pharmaceutical Services in England 2015/16–2024/25. 1.16 billion items dispensed by community pharmacies in 2024/25; 97% via EPS.

UK Government / Department of Health and Social Care. £340 million pharmacy boost brings faster care to the high street. More than 3.3 million Pharmacy First consultations between March 2025 and February 2026.

World Pharmacy Council. Sector Analysis Report 2025. Community pharmacy's economic and social value and its role as critical healthcare infrastructure.

McKinsey & Company. Meeting changing consumer needs: The US retail pharmacy of the future. Consumer preferences, convenience, omnichannel engagement and expanding pharmacy services.

HiStone. LUNA X All-in-One POS System product information and specifications.