RedSail Technologies’ Axys: Leveraging Strengths on a Modern Platform

Rich Muller, VP of product management, and Jim McDonald, VP of long-term care (LTC) and institutional sales, talk about the development of Axys scheduled for release in 2025

PTMR: Share with us the development journey of Axys and a few of its differentiating features.

Rich Muller: When we became Redsail Technologies, the first thing we did was to evaluate our portfolio — our strengths and our weaknesses as well as where the market was headed. The conclusion we came to very quickly is that we needed to get into the cloud.

We started with cutting-edge tools that were proven to work for a cloud-based environment. We began with PostgreSQL, an open-source relational database management system emphasizing extensibility and SQL [structured query language] compliance. Right off the bat we used an SQL database derivative that was multithreaded and that’s faster and better than SQL. That was in the cloud. Where possible we try to look at the best tools that are the most cost-efficient — savings we can pass on to the customer.

We started with absolutely nothing. We didn’t try to take pieces and parts of old software and repurpose them. We also asked, what are the things that [our existing] PrimeCare does well that we think are best practices in LTC? What are the things that PrimeCare doesn’t do well?

PTMR: You took what you liked in PrimeCare and then started from scratch?

Muller: One of the things that we thought we did well in PrimeCare was the way we handled cycle fill and complex billing scenarios. Also, our interface connectivity — being able to connect to a wide variety of vendors for compliance packaging, billing, and the other types of systems. And bringing our support level up: When we became RedSail that was a focus of ours. Now we wanted to have that same level of support for our customers as they moved to Axys.

Rich Muller, VP of Product Management

Jim McDonald: One of the things we liked about our system was that it was very customizable, but it was also too customizable. Now there is more flexibility in regard to making things simpler, easier to do. The system will be intuitive. And that includes the training as well. We had a customer see a demo at a conference and in five minutes he was filling a prescription on Axys. Ease of training is important to keep staff.

Jim McDonald, VP of Long-term Care (LTC) and Institutional Sales

Muller: We put more guardrails into the system. As we rolled it out very methodically we got feedback from customers about when the guardrails are too restrictive. Some customers are not going to want to do certain things, and then there are other pharmacies that want to make fixes on their own. We put that flexibility into the system.