“Our actual Rx volumes are more than double what we originally forecasted when we opened our doors in 2001,” says Terry Kurtz, director of pharmacy at Pueblo Community Health Center. “Prior to automating with PharmASSIST, we were struggling to keep up with our workload and we had no way of tracking prescriptions during the filling process. Finding misplaced prescriptions was extremely labor intensive and often caused disruptions among our staff.”

Rx Volume:
Pueblo Community Health Center fills on average 420 prescriptions per day and has peak periods that reach over 700 prescriptions daily.

Solution:
The health center employs a PharmASSIST Symphony+ System comprised of 2 PharmASSIST cabinets, 100 dispensers, and 7 workstations. The PharmASSIST system is integrated with the health center’s Renlar pharmacy management system, ensuring real-time prescription order flow for all filling tasks.

Benefits:
According to Kurtz, the health center is well on their way to achieving their initial goals, and is also realizing various other benefits. “Today we’re filling around 65% of our total volume with the automated counting, and the system’s Rx tracking capability has been huge for us. Within seconds we know exactly where to find and know the specific status of any prescription in our pharmacy.”

“In just a few months, our workload is much more manageable, our quality control is better than ever, and our patient wait times are down significantly,” says Kurtz. “PharmASSIST’s reporting capabilities have also been a great help. We generate the operator barcode mis-scan report constantly and present that to our quality improvement committee. And we run the Return-to-Stock report daily to identify prescriptions in our will call bins that have not been picked up by patients. This helps keep our patient pickup area well organized and helps to generate revenue because we can resell the drugs that aren’t picked up,” he adds.

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