The ‘Amazon-style' tracker allows people to check the status of their medications and has already been used 715,000 times since May – equivalent to once every nine seconds. 

Around 1,650 high street chemists – including every Boots in England – are now offering the service, which enables patients to check if their medicines are "ready to collect" or "dispatched by pharmacy" if they are being delivered. 

Since the launch, nearly 4.4m people have viewed their prescription in the app – with 394,000 also using the app's new tracking feature to check whether their prescription was ready. 

Almost half (45%) of phone calls to community pharmacies are estimated to be from patients asking if their prescription is ready.  

Latest data shows the NHS App now has 37.4m registered users with an average of 11.4m people logging in each month to manage their healthcare.   

A total of 61.5m repeat prescriptions have been ordered via the NHS App in the past 12 months – a 46% increase on the previous year. There were also 87.4m views of patient test results during the same period. 

Dr Vin Diwakar, clinical transformation director at NHS England, said: ‘It's brilliant that so many people are making use of the new Amazon-style tracking feature in the NHS App, which means you can now be sure your prescription is ready before setting off to the chemist. 

‘For those who rely on regular prescriptions, the tracker offers near real-time updates on when their medicines are ready, like you can get for your online shopping, and this is all part of our shift to give people more control over their care through the NHS App. It's also freeing up more time for pharmacists to spend with their patients by cutting the number of calls to chemists.

‘We're seeing millions more people using the app to easily order repeat prescriptions and get faster access to their test results – I'd encourage anyone who hasn't logged in for a while to take a look and see how the new features can help them manage their healthcare from wherever they are.'

The prescription tracking feature is just one of many planned improvements to the NHS App, which will soon expand to offer patients more appointment options and greater choice as part of the government's commitment to put patients in control of their healthcare and reduce waiting lists. 

The feature is expected to be made available to nearly 5,000 more pharmacies within the next 12 months – covering 60% of those in England. 

Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting said: ‘We are driving the reform necessary to make the NHS as easy and convenient to use as doing your shopping or banking online.' 

Ryan's Pharmacy in Brighouse, West Yorkshire, is the second busiest pharmacy dispensary in Yorkshire – fulfilling more than 30,000 prescription items each month. 

Previously, the online pharmacy needed five phonelines to field all the calls from patients with prescription enquiries, but since their IT supplier Cegedim Rx integrated with the NHS App, phone calls have dropped by around 80%. 

Pharmacist and managing Director for Ryan's Pharmacy, Yasif Salim said: ‘Before the digital prescription updates were available on the NHS App the phone would ring constantly. And when it wasn't ringing, we were just waiting for it to happen. Some days it felt quite stressful and overwhelming. 

'We pride ourselves on our customer service and that means trying our very best not to let a call go unanswered. But some nights I went to sleep and dreamt of the phones ringing. And I know that feeling ran across the whole team. 

‘The beauty of it is that in pharmacy we didn't need to do anything. There wasn't any switch on preparations that we needed to make, and it didn't add any additional steps into the dispensing process. We could just carry on as usual and everything was handled by pharmacy manager.'

Reaction

Ruth Rankine, primary care director and neighbourhood lead at the NHS Confederation, said: ‘It is really positive that the new prescription tracking feature in the NHS App is being so well received by the public.

‘Community pharmacies have a key role to play in neighbourhood health services – alongside other primary and community care services – so freeing up pharmacists to dedicate more time to prevention activities and long-term condition management is really important.'

She added: 'We need to remember that not everyone will be able to use tools such as this, so it's important that we also design our services to reflect the needs of those who need them the most.'

Henry Gregg, chief executive of the National Pharmacy Association, said: ‘The introduction of real-time prescription tracking is a game-changer and if rolled out equitably to all pharmacies, it will encourage greater use of the NHS App. In many pharmacies, we've seen limited patient uptake of the NHS App largely because this functionality wasn't previously available.

‘Pharmacies want to do all they can to embrace new technology and make the vital services they offer as easy and convenient as possible for patients to access.

‘A number of pharmacies already use tracking apps for prescriptions. Anything that allows pharmacies to focus on delivering first-class patient care, rather than spending time on phone calls to provide prescription status updates is welcome news.'