Case Study: Walgreens empowers pharmacists with real-time prescription insights with Microsoft Azure

Walgreens empowers pharmacists with an intelligent prescription data platform on Azure

Walgreens, a major U.S. pharmacy chain, needed a more reliable, cloud-first way to handle hundreds of millions of prescription transactions across nearly 9,000 stores. Its legacy data systems were siloed and slow, taking up to two days to process prescription data, which limited how quickly pharmacists could access patient and operational insights. Walgreens worked with Microsoft Azure, using services such as Azure Databricks and Azure Synapse Analytics, to build a modern intelligent data platform.

Microsoft Azure helped Walgreens implement an event-based, microservices-driven Information, Data, and Insights platform that processes prescription data in real time and surfaces insights through Power BI dashboards. The result was a dramatic improvement in speed and scale, with the ability to handle around 40,000 transactions per second and reduce data availability from 48 hours to minutes. This gave pharmacists and technicians faster access to patient information and improved customer engagement and care.

Walgreens

Sashi Venkatesan

Director of Product Engineering, Pharmacy and Healthcare Data Product Line