Titan will spend an additional £1m reinvesting in AI development this year, attendees revealed at a technology event hosted by the company.
TitanUp 26 brought together Titan PMR users, clinical speakers, technology partners, exhibitors, and pharmacy owners to discuss how community pharmacies can leverage technology, automation, and services to create more sustainable operating models and improve business efficiency.
The company announced new products and features to support its pharmacy business, alongside significant investments in the field of AI to increase efficiency, progress in the development of Titanverse and the Everything Platform.
face the reality of business
Tariq Muhammad, CEO of Invatech Health, which operates Titan PMR and Titanverse, acknowledged the challenges facing the pharmacy business.
Mr Tariq reflected on his past struggles building a pharmacy business that was completely reliant on the NHS and encouraged contractors to take steps to stabilize their businesses.
“The main objective is to make sure you’re financially sound. If you make money, you can help patients, you can create new services, you can help your staff, you can get a higher salary, you can advance your career. You can buy more pharmacies, you can invest in them.”
Tariq Muhammadtitan
He told attendees about the “P-word” and explained that it meant “profit.”
“Seeking profit does not mean being greedy,” he told attendees. “Seeking profit does not make you selfish. Seeking profit simply means acknowledging the reality that you are in business.”
“As you know, profit is not the opposite of care. Profit is an enabler of care,” he said.
Tariq explained that while there are barriers to success, they are within a company’s control and can be ingrained as habits.
He outlined three habits to break: relying on the NHS, providing services for free and not using data. He then shared three new habits to form: working on your control circle, streamlining your operations, and developing new sources of income.
Tariq announces development roadmap and new features designed to support pharmacy businesses. “Starting today, Titan no longer stands for PMR,” he said. “Starting today, Titan means business.”
“Clinical AI in pharmacy needs to be built right, so we are putting an extra £1m into AI development. This means investing in our own models, our own infrastructure and the clinical governance behind it,” he said.
Michael Holden, Managing Director of MH Associates, reinforced this theme, telling attendees that profits also require planning.
“This is about profits, but we’re going to introduce another P-word in a second, and that’s ‘planning.’ Because without a plan and some of the measures that are part of that plan, how do you know you’re successful?”
At Holden’s point, the discussion returned to action. Ambition only matters if the owner can turn it into a measurable plan.
Mr. Rahul Puri also spoke as a customer case study. His session focused on patient intent and the need for pharmacies to build long-term patient journeys rather than individual transactions.
“I’m not going to talk about Pharmacy First today,” he said. “I’m not going to talk about flu shots, and I’m not going to give you a list of 10 services that need to be rolled out tomorrow. Instead, I’m going to share a strategy that has completely changed the way I understand how pharmacies should grow.”
He argued that activity alone cannot create a sustainable pharmacy business.
“Activity and profit are not the same thing,” Puri says. “Being busy and creating value are two completely different things. Being busy is not a business model. I think it’s a symptom.”
He said he believes there is an opportunity in understanding why patients come to pharmacies.
“I believe the future of pharmacy revenue is determined by patient intent,” he said.
“One patient consultation generates revenue, but the patient journey is a business.”
Reece Lloyd, co-founder of PharmAppy, said customer expectations were high and it was important to facilitate patient access.
“Pharmacies have entered the consumer world,” he said.
“Patients are no longer comparing you to a pharmacy, they’re comparing your experience to everything else in their lives: Amazon, Uber, banking apps, food delivery, social media. That’s the benchmark now.”
He said pharmacy websites and apps are now part of how patients decide whether a service is modern, accessible and reliable.
“Your website is now your digital gateway,” he said.
Ghulam Haydar from Allied Health Training, former GPhC clinical advisor and specialist examiner, focused on governance.
“When you develop a civilian service, it comes with great responsibility,” he said.
He told participants that private services require owners and regulators to carefully consider routes, risk assessments, training records, consultation records, audit trails and regulatory compliance.
“If it’s not recorded, it didn’t happen,” he said.
Technology announcement
Wahid Muhammad, Titan’s Chief Technology Officer, discussed the company’s latest efforts in artificial intelligence.
“We are not using AI,” he said. “We build AI.”
He explained that Titan has built its own model and infrastructure with the support of AI experts and an in-house clinical team of pharmacists and clinicians, aligning its operations with the MHRA’s medical device requirements and external governance.
Regarding the use of general-purpose AI tools, he said, “It’s not enough when it comes to health tech. It’s not enough when it comes to clinical systems.”
Titan announces Level-5 Titan AI. Wahid described this as a “foundational” development for the company’s clinical laboratory automation, which he predicted would manage up to 90% of laboratory tests, freeing up a significant amount of pharmacists’ time.
“The performance of AI is determined by the data used to train it,” says Wahid.
He told attendees that Level Five was the result of a restructured in-house AI team led by AI professor Professor Mohamed Bilal, supported by an additional PhD engineer and an in-house clinical team of pharmacists, who trained the model “on hundreds of thousands of lines of dispensing data.”
“Titanverse is both a business platform and a financial platform,” he said.
Mr. Wahid laid out a broad repositioning of Titanverse from a private services platform to a complete business and financial platform for independent pharmacies. New features within Titanverse target areas where pharmacies lose the most revenue, including a concession management system, an integrated billing process that flags missing approvals before submission, and a live view of expired inventory.
“The smoke and mirrors are blurred,” he said, referring to today’s independent pharmacies’ visibility into revenue and cost of goods. “We’re here to stop it.”
The new tools include real-time gross profit visualization capabilities and will be built directly into Titanverse after reverse engineering the FP34 pricing engine in collaboration with the NHS Business Services Authority.
“This is truly a job in your pocket,” Wahid said.
A mobile version of Titanverse has also been announced, available on iOS and Android, and features customizable KPI dashboards, prescription lab tests, live financial summaries, integrated messaging across teams, and private service consultation extensions.
Other announcements include a new inventory management system with cross-branch transfer visibility, a redesigned pharmacy board, a one-click MDS process for tray management, Titan’s unique integrated CD register, and more.
new approach
In addition to keynotes and product updates, the day featured live demonstrations, customer interviews, exhibitors, networking, a dedicated event app, and a humanoid robot interviewing guests.
The robot conducted impromptu interviews with sponsors, attendees, and speakers by initiating conversations.
“This is the best TitanUp event I’ve ever been to. It’s a whole different ball game,” said Tas Bhatti, founding member of the IPCN Independent Contractor Network.
“This has been a game changer for us. We are saving time,” said Pritpal Grewal, who runs Balance Pharmacy and operates a BD Rowa robot integrated with Titan. “Work that used to be done at 5 or 6 p.m. now ends around 1 p.m.”
After six months on Titan, Hayden Pharmacy’s Maresh said, “I completely walked away from pharmacy, simple as that.” “Now that I am consulting with patients, I am also able to earn some income.”
With more than 1,500 community pharmacies on its platform, a £1 million reinvestment program in AI, and a customer base that its founders describe as a movement, the company says it intends to move to take on a different role as “the operating infrastructure for independent community pharmacies over the next 10 years”.
Titan is no longer a “PMR provider that competes on features,” Tariq told customers. “You didn’t just buy a system. You joined something.”
