About
We built the wrong product first. This one is shaped by that.
Agile Pharmas is the company. AgileRx is the product: clinical services software for Ontario pharmacies, running alongside the dispensing system you already have — not instead of it. We got there by being told no.
The pivot
Pharmacy owners were interested. Pharmacy staff were not.
AgileRx originally set out to build prescription-dispensing software — the core system, replaced. We took it to market and tested it properly, and the answer came back split. Owners liked the idea. The people who would actually have to use it, every hour of every shift, pushed back hard: ripping out the dispensing workflow they know is an enormous amount of friction to absorb, and the payoff for the person at the counter was not obvious.
They were right, so we stopped. The product now adds modules alongside the system the pharmacy already runs, instead of replacing it. Nothing about the dispensing workflow changes. Nothing about the terminal changes. The clinical services that Ontario funds — and the incident reporting the College will require — get their own surface.
That failure is the reason the product is shaped the way it is. We would rather say so than claim we saw it coming.
What we set out to build
A prescription-dispensing system. Replace the core workflow, own the whole store.
Rejected by the staff who would have had to run it.
What we build now
Clinical modules that sit alongside the dispensing system already in the store. The core workflow is left exactly where it is.
No rip-and-replace. Nothing to migrate.
How we decided to build it
Four choices, and the reason for each
Alongside, never instead of
AgileRx is designed to integrate with Fillware, and that adapter is not built yet — so the product does not depend on it. An assisted worklist mode means AgileRx works with no integration at all: the pharmacy runs it beside the dispensing system on day one, and an adapter, when it lands, removes typing rather than unblocking the product.
Ontario only, deliberately
ODB, MedsCheck, the Ontario minor-ailments programme, the College’s AIMS standard. These are provincial regimes, and the details are the entire product — the eligibility rule, the right PIN of four, the merged billing category, the mandatory field. Going national in year one would mean being shallow in ten places instead of correct in one.
The rails go further than we do
Incident reporting runs on the same National Incident Data Repository rails used by eight other provinces, so the path out of Ontario exists and we know where it goes. It is simply not year one. We would rather earn the second province than announce it.
iPad-first, on purpose
AgileRx is a separate device, not another window on the dispensing terminal. Clinical services do not happen at the counter — they happen next to the patient, in the aisle, in the consultation room, at the door. The tablet is carried to the patient. A second window on the same screen would have kept the work stuck at the terminal, which is exactly where it does not get done.
The company
Agile Pharmas, AgileRx, and The Agile Group
Agile Pharmas is the company; AgileRx is the product it builds. Agile Pharmas is a venture of The Agile Group.
We are working with a pilot pharmacy in Ontario — a real store, running the real workflow, telling us which of our assumptions are wrong. We are not going to name it, and we are not going to put a pharmacist’s face on a website to borrow their credibility. When we have numbers from the pilot that we can stand behind, we will publish them with their method attached, the same way every other number on this site carries its source.
Agile Pharmas · Ontario, Canada · hello@agilepharmas.com
Tell us where we are still wrong
The last time pharmacy staff told us the product was wrong, we changed it. That offer stands. If you run a pharmacy in Ontario, we would rather hear it now than after we have built it.