Exercise 1.6 Consider the following process at a pharmacy. Customers drop off th
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Question
Exercise 1.6 Consider the following process at a pharmacy.
Customers drop off their prescriptions either in the drive-through counter or in the front
counter of the pharmacy. Customers can request that their prescription be filled immediately.
In this case, they have to wait between 15 minutes and one hour depending on the current
workload. Most customers are not willing to wait that long, so they opt to nominate a pickup
time at a later point during the day. Generally, customers drop their prescriptions in the
morning before going to work (or at lunchtime) and they come back to pick up the drugs
after work, typically between 5pm and 6pm.When dropping their prescription, a technician
asks the customer for the pick-up time and puts the prescription in a box labeled with the
hour preceding the pick-up time. For example, if the customer asks to have the prescription
be ready at 5pm, the technician will drop it in the box with the label 4pm (there is one box
for each hour of the day).
Every hour, one of the pharmacy technicians picks up the prescriptions due to be filled in the
current hour. The technician then enters the details of each prescription (e.g. doctor details,
patient details and medication details) into the pharmacy system. As soon as the details of
a prescription are entered, the pharmacy system performs an automated check called Drug
Utilization Review (DUR). This check is meant to determine if the prescription contains
any drugs that may be incompatible with other drugs that had been dispensed to the same
customer in the past, or drugs that may be inappropriate for the customer taking into account
the customer data maintained in the system (e.g. age).
Any alarms raised during the automated DUR are reviewed by a pharmacist who performs a
more thorough check. In some cases, the pharmacist even has to call the doctor who issued
the prescription in order to confirm it.
After the DUR, the system performs an insurance check in order to determine whether
the customer’s insurance policy will pay for part or for the whole cost of the drugs. In
most cases, the output of this check is that the insurance company would pay for a certain
percentage of the costs, while the customer has to pay for the remaining part (also called
the co-payment). The rules for determining how much the insurance company will pay and
how much the customer has to pay are very complicated. Every insurance company has
different rules. In some cases, the insurance policy does not cover one or several drugs in a
prescription, but the drug in question can be replaced by another drug that is covered by the
insurance policy. When such cases are detected, the pharmacist generally calls the doctor
and/or the patient to determine if it is possible to perform the drug replacement.
Once the prescription passes the insurance check, it is assigned to a technician who collects
the drugs from the shelves and puts them in a bag with the prescription stapled to it. After
the technician has filled a given prescription, the bag is passed to the pharmacist who double-checks that the prescription has been filled correctly. After this quality check, the
pharmacist seals the bag and puts it in the pick-up area. When a customer arrives to pick up
a prescription, a technician retrieves the prescription and asks the customer for payment in
case the drugs in the prescription are not (fully) covered by the customer’s insurance.
With respect to the above process, consider the following questions:
1. What type of process is the above one: order-to-cash, procure-to-pay or issue-toresolution?
2. Who are the actors in this process?
3. What value does the process deliver to its customer(s)?
4. What are the possible outcomes of this process?
5. Taking the perspective of the customer, what performance measures can be attached
to this process?
6. What potential issues do you foresee this process might have? What information
would you need to collect in order to analyze these issues?
7. What possible changes do you think could be made to this process in order to
address the above issues?
Consider the pharmacy prescription fulfillment process described in Exercise 1.6. Identify the steps in this process and classify them into value-adding, business value-adding and non-value-adding.
Explanation / Answer
1. The type of process is the above one is issue-to-resolution. As here the resolution is done to avoid the conflict with the insurance company as they have the different protocols to follow. So, the prescriptions are cross checked with DUR.
2. The actors in this process are- Customers, pharmacy technicians, doctors and the insurance companies.
3. The value does the process deliver to its customers are as follows:
4.The possible outcomes of the process is conflict free and provide the customer satisfactory results as they no need to have any load or pain from the insurance company. The customers have no longer to wait in the queue If they are busy. The company itself do all the checks and then finally generates the report.
5. Taking the perspective of the customer, the performance measures can be attached
to this process is the matrix evaluation of the process. It would help the process to clearly understand by the physician and done with the less time duration.
6. The potential issues that I foresee this process might have are time consuming process. It is the tedious and time taking process which make not be completed on time and requires a lot of the procedure to follow. If the number of prescriptions per day increases then it is hard to deliver on time. To resolve this, it may require more number of employees.
The information I need to collect in order to analyze these issues are
7. The possible changes that I think could be made to this process in order to
address the above issues is employee more human resources. Buy the specific number of equipment’s of the measurement according to the increase in the customers.
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