Reliant Care Solutions
Reliant Care Solutions
Pharmacy Technician
May 2012 – Present
Reliant Care Solutions is a retail and long-term care pharmacy that excels in customer service, especially in relation to nursing homes. Although my role since May of 2012 has been labeled a pharmacy technician, I have also been working on small IT projects to increase the efficiency of the pharmacy during that time. 75% of my day is spent counting refills for over 3,000 patients and creating weekly and monthly blister packs for our nursing home patients. We currently handle twelve different nursing homes from New Jersey to Massachusetts, each with patients taking five to twenty-five medications daily that we handled for them.
Running out of prescription and over-the-counter medications and therefore having to ‘owe’ our patients the following day was an issue we had been dealing with daily. In order to significantly decrease the amount of medications owed to patients, I pulled and analyzed various reports including:
- The number of patients per facility and the corresponding days that we delivered refills and medication packages to them.
- Every prescription and over-the-counter medication each patient was currently taking in their weekly medication packages.
- Every prescription and over-the counter medication each patient was taking separately from their weekly medication packages.
- How often they requested these same over-the-counter medications.
Through an analysis of each report, I was able to identify how many bottles and packages of each prescription medication and over-the-counter products that we would need on hand weekly. By taking this raw data and turning it into information I created a just-in-time inventory that significantly decreased our costs, and increased our customer satisfaction at the same time.
An example of the impact:
About a week after the implementation of JIT inventory, one of our nursing home patients called the pharmacy to let us know that she would be needing one of her medications by the following day, a drug that we usually had to order for her when she called because we did not keep it on-hand. Due to the accuracy of the report analysis, we knew exactly when she would be needing a refill on this specific medication, and had it ordered and put aside the drug for her previously in the week. She no longer had to wait on us; we were prepared this time and delivered it to her the same day.
More reporting:
Another reporting project I worked on was pulling a list of every drug we used in the entire pharmacy and filtering out the top twenty drugs that our patients were prescribed to. After getting the approval from my boss, we ordered an overstock supply so that we would never find ourselves in the position of not having our most used drugs in stock. These are just two small examples of how small IT steps can save money and also increase customer satisfaction.
How I have benefitted from this:
MIS is about using technology to improve a business’s processes. I believe that this part-time job allowed me to put this into action. I was able to see first-hand how IT can make a company more effective, efficient, and competitive. At the same time I was improving my business and data analysis skills as well; something that I will be using throughout my entire MIS career post-graduation.