How Many Unnecessary Calls Does an Average Pharmacy Get Per Day

An unnecessary call for a pharmacy is any call that can be answered without involvement from a licensed pharmacist — a call seeking administrative information only, requiring no clinical judgment. It isn't "unnecessary" from the patient's perspective; it's unnecessary in terms of how it uses the pharmacist's professional time.

Common categories of unnecessary calls:

- Hours and location: "When are you open on Friday?", "Are you open on holidays?"
- Prescription status: "Is my prescription ready for pickup?"
- Medication availability: "Do you have [medication] in stock?"
- Renewal requests: "I'd like to renew my prescription for [medication]"
- Price and packaging: "How much does [medication] cost? Which size do you carry?"

According to the NCPA (National Community Pharmacists Association, 2023), these six categories account for 63% of all inbound calls to retail pharmacies — a figure consistent with call patterns observed at Israeli pharmacies.

Israeli market data (basis: Pharmacy Times 2023, adapted for Israel):

- Small neighborhood pharmacy (up to 100 prescriptions/day): 40–80 calls per day
- Mid-sized urban pharmacy (100–300 prescriptions/day): 80–150 calls per day
- Large pharmacy / chain location (300+ prescriptions/day): 150–300 calls per day

Israel has 3,200+ pharmacies (Ministry of Health, 2023). The national average: approximately 110 calls per day for a mid-sized pharmacy.

Of those 110 calls: 66–77 are unnecessary in terms of pharmacist involvement. That's 528–616 calls per week, and 2,200–2,500 calls per month — all handled manually by staff.

A realistic cost calculation for an average pharmacy (110 calls/day, 70 unnecessary):

- Average call duration: 3 minutes (ASHP, 2024)
- Daily time on unnecessary calls: 70 × 3 = 210 minutes = 3.5 hours per day
- Hourly staff cost: ₪65–85 (including employer costs)
- Daily cost: ₪227–297
- Monthly cost: ₪4,900–6,400
- Annual cost: ₪59,000–77,000

This is money paid to employees to perform a task that software can handle — without errors, without fatigue, 24/7.

Additionally: every call a pharmacist answers from the counter — interrupting a face-to-face consultation — creates an average delay of 4–7 minutes for each customer in the queue (internal study, Israeli pharmacy chain, 2024).

An AI voice agent for pharmacies reduces by 60–70% the number of calls that reach a pharmacist. Prescription renewal calls and medication questions are handled automatically — the pharmacist is available for calls that genuinely require them.

Two factors make the call overload problem particularly acute in Israel:

1. Prescription cycles: In Israel, chronic prescriptions are issued for one to three months. The end of each month creates a "call surge" — all patients whose prescriptions expire call simultaneously. A pharmacy can experience three times its normal call volume in the first three days of each month.

2. Concentrated hours: 60% of all daily calls arrive between 9:00 AM and 1:00 PM (based on call traffic analysis at Israeli pharmacies). The staff during these hours is the same staff handling the physical queue — a double bottleneck.

The solution: a voice AI that operates 24/7 and in parallel, with no limit on simultaneous calls. Even during peak end-of-month surges — every caller receives an immediate answer.