Commitment extends customer connection

Drug Store News,  Dec 19, 2005  by James Frederick

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Boosting customer service and cutting operating costs continue to drive the search for new technology at Wal-Mart Pharmacy.

"Technology will always be used to drive expenses out of the business," said Karl Bedwell, director of specialty systems for Wal-Mart's Information Systems Division. "At Wal-Mart, our main concern is ... everything we do in technology is driven toward helping that pharmacist connect with the customer."

Thus, Bedwell said, when the company was still developing Connexus, Wal-Mart's four-year-old, integrated pharmacy computer system, "we used pharmacists to develop the work flow to make sense at store level so that we were helping the right person: the pharmacy associate."

Connexus continues to undergo ongoing enhancements, Bedwell said. One is Easy Pay, which allows Wal-Mart to eliminate occasional bottlenecking at the cash register by automatically storing the customers' credit card and insurance information into the system so that "we can adjudicate that prescription [claim] without going through the register process," he explained.

But perhaps the biggest recent enhancement to Connexus, he said, has been the rollout of Wal-Mart's Rx Network, which is driven by a central database. "We have prescriptions all over the nation [stored] real-time within our national database here in Bentonville, [Ark.]," Bedwell said. Wal-Mart pharmacists in any store can access that information instantly, eliminating the need to key in all of that information repeatedly. "From the customer's standpoint, if you're traveling to Florida and you forgot your [prescription] bottle, our pharmacist can still get access to that [prescription]."

The national rollout of Rx Network came in time for a crucial test of its capabilities, a test that proved just how valuable a national prescription database can be: Hurricane Katrina. Rx Network came through with flying colors, Bedwell said.

"Obviously, a lot of our customers were displaced--we had over 100 stores closed during that time," he explained. "It was an emergency situation for those customers, but they could go to any Wal-Mart in the nation and just give them their name and address, and the pharmacist had instant access to those prescriptions."

Added Ron Chomiuk, vice president of pharmacy operations, "As people started spreading throughout the country, it was the opportune time to have a system like this because we were able to take care of all these evacuees, no matter where they were."

Underlying all the enhancements to Connexus and the pharmacy work flow is a basic service mandate, Bedwell said. "We want our pharmacists to be freed up to talk to our customers. So as much as possible, we off-load the dispensing processes ... to the technicians.

"The system forces those processes to different job codes for technicians and pharmacists," he added. "The least amount our pharmacists [are] on the computer ... the better off we are."

Technicians also benefit in time saved, fewer keystrokes and a more accurate and verifiable prescription dispensing process. "We fill off a scanned, Ionscreen] image of the prescription, so they don't have to keep up with the actual paper going through the pharmacy," Bedwell explained. The process also is backed up by bar-code scanning of the pill bottle. "There are a lot of checks for accuracy," he said.

Other Connexus system improvements are in the works. Among them: as-yet-undefined clinical enhancements to help Wal-Mart pharmacists deliver a higher level of disease management, therapeutic oversight and patient care.

"As we get more into Medication Therapy Management" with the launch of the Medicare Part D drug benefit program, Bedwell said, "there will be system enhancements to help that pharmacist help that customer."

Other system enhancements, including robotics and other automated dispensing processes, also are under consideration.

On a broader scale, however, "where we can, we try to take advantage of the systems we have developed for store use," Bedwell explained. Key to that effort has been the recent adoption of WalMart's leading-edge inventory reorder technology for the pharmaceutical side of the business.

"We have recently been able to integrate our Strategic Replenishment System in pharmacy," he told Drug Store News. That technology, he added, "is the same system that reorders merchandise throughout the store and uses complicated logic for seasonal demand," which certainly has vast applications in pharmacy.

The system could provide another boon in terms of putting pharmacists in front of patients. "Pharmacy is able to take advantage of the investment that WalMart has made over the years in replenishment to free our pharmacist up from having to manually order the pharmaceutical merchandise," Bedwell explained. "Of course, the pharmacist can always override and order manually to get merchandise in the next day if our customers have special needs."