Tech firms answer chain pharmacy's call for productivity

Drug Store News, Dec 15, 2003 by Dan Scheraga

With prescription volumes still on the rise and no end to the pharmacist shortage in sight, drug store chains are under more pressure than ever to raise productivity at the pharmacy. More frequently, technology is seen as the natural solution to that challenge. Manufacturers and developers of pharmacy automation and management solutions have responded to the call with a new wave of high-tech offerings.

The scope of the pharmacist shortage is illustrated in research from the National Association of Chain Drug Stores. NACDS projects that over the next five years, the volume of dispensed prescriptions will balloon 46 percent. The projected rise in the number of available pharmacists over that same time period: only 5.4 percent.

The pharmacist shortage continues to weigh heavily on the minds of chain drug store executives and the solutions providers that serve them. "One of the major trends we've seen is that prescription volumes are growing at one rate, and the number of new pharmacists is growing at about 10 times less," said Sam Nebiolo, senior product manager of Pittsburgh-based McKesson Automated Prescription Systems. "The big question is, how do we support these pharmacists who are already overworked but are still faced with an increasing workload?

"The answer is to give them the technology to make them productive enough to handle the load," he concluded.

Retail chain pharmacies are beginning to feel the squeeze already. Chains big and small are turning to technology to address the gap between the growth in pharmacy and the number of new pharmacists available to fill all those extra prescriptions.

At CVS, for instance, improving productivity and service at the pharmacy counter remains a major focus for the chain. Its new Pharmacy Service Initiative, or PSI, is ah outgrowth of CVS' Excellence in Pharmacy Service Innovation and Care program, which used technology and physical improvements to re-engineer work flow behind the counter. PSI, now in some 2,600 stores, improves CVS' pharmacy systems to enable CVS pharmacy staff to ajudicate third party prescription within three minutes or less. In stores where it has been implemented the longest, we have experienced quite substantial improvements in service levels. We are moving from good service to great service," CVS chief financial officer David Rickard told analysts in a recent conference call to discuss the chain's third quarter results. Rickard said the chain expects to complete the rollout of PSI by year's end.

The pharmacist shortage is a very real issue, and let's face it, it doesn't appear to be going away," said John Frandson, who is in charge of pharmacy tech support at Minneapolis-based Nash Finch Co. "It presents a challenge to us in particular because our company continues to expand. We're adding more and more stores, so naturally we re concerned about the availability of pharmacists to staff them."

So far, Nash Finch has been dealing with the labor crunch with the CRx pharmacy management solution from QS/1 Data Systems, based in Spartanburg, S.C. The system, which has been in place at Nash Finch for the past eight years, handles prescription pricing, processing, third party billing and other day-to-day functions.

"It raises the productivity of the pharmacists we have, so we don't have to keep adding people," Frandson said.

Pharmacy management

QS/1 recently built upon its existing pharmacy management product line with the release of its new NRx application. The pharmacy management solution was introduced at the NACDS Pharmacy and Technology Conference, held in Philadelphia last summer.

NRx represents an improvement over QS/1's previous pharmacy management systems, CRx and Rx Care Plus, in that it is the vendor's first product with a graphical user interface. Whereas QS/1's previous solutions relied upon text menus and prompts to guide the user, NRx uses an intuitive point-and-click interface with-pull-down and popup menus.

"It added an extra dimension of flexibility," said Tyler Thompson, QS/1's,national chain sales manager. Previous solutions could be controlled with the keyboard only. NRx allows the mouse to be used in conjunction with the keyboard, giving the pharmacist an added level of comfort." He added that NRx's intuitive interface is easy to learn, which cuts down on training time.

NRx also features enhanced security functions and onscreen pill imaging. In addition, it allows pharmacists to scan written prescriptions into a patient's file.

QS/1 also is aiming to improve the value proposition of its applications with the introduction of centralized architecture. New capabilities added to QS/l's line of pharmacy management solutions enable the applications to serve all locations from a single server at the retailer's data center. QS/1 also recently introduced an Application Service Provider option, under which the application is hosted at QS/1's own data centers.

Operating an application in a hosted environment rather than on in-store servers dramatically reduces the complexity of system maintenance. In a hosted environment, patches, updates and reconfigurations need only be applied once, at a single central point. When solutions run on in-store servers, every change must be applied multiple times: once at each affected store.