Data And Image Capture Software Doubles Pharmacy's Fulfillment Capacity

Prescription Solutions Mail Service Pharmacy, an operating unit of Costa Mesa, CA-based Prescription Solutions, processes, dispenses, and mails approximately 5 million prescriptions each year. By 1999, the pharmacy had rapidly outgrown its original facility in San Diego. At the time, the operation was processing up to 15,000 mail order prescriptions over two 8-hour shifts daily, in a building that had been designed to handle 6,000 prescriptions per day in a single 8-hour shift. Demand for prescription fulfillment was rising; by 2000, the organization expected to be handling 3.75 million prescriptions annually.

The company was using a manual, paper-based prescription processing methodology that was time-consuming and inefficient. To fulfill orders, paperwork moved manually from one production area to another and from work bin to work bin. Prescriptions and supporting documents were handled and rehandled by pharmacy technicians and pharmacists as each order was filled or problems were identified and resolved. Problem orders, whether they had arrived by regular mail or electronically, had to be thoroughly documented on paper. Telephone inquiries about orders from customers and physicians during the fulfillment process often required physically tracking down the related paperwork.

In 2000, a decision was made to not only move the pharmacy to an 84,000-square-foot facility, but also to replace paper-based processing with an automated solution. According to Bill Mickle, Prescription Solutions' VP of operations, the pharmacy was determined to find a data and image capture system which, through the use of OCR/ICR (optical character recognition/intelligent character recognition), would significantly reduce data entry and turnaround time while increasing fulfillment accuracy. The company also wanted a solution that would integrate with other technologies designed to streamline prescription processing.

After reviewing several different solutions, Prescription Solutions chose FormWare, an information capture application from Captiva Software Corp. (San Diego). It was deployed along with an industry-standard scanner interface.

Information Capture Solution Reduces Errors, Cuts Labor Costs
The system works by first "reading" prescription information received at the pharmacy in printed mode or importing prescription data contained in electronic data streams. Data are then cleaned up, analyzed for readability, rescanned if necessary, and routed to the mainframe workflow management system from FileNet (Costa Mesa, CA). An API (application programming interface) enables scanned data to be automatically populated to the workflow management component.

Pharmacy operators, who previously spent much of their day performing such tasks as collecting paper prescriptions and physically delivering them to the appropriate areas, now receive work automatically in electronic queues. Completed orders are automatically routed to the proper destinations.

Mickle notes that the end-to-end document capture and order fulfillment workflow solution allows Prescription Solutions to remain ahead of business demands. The facility can now process 18,000 prescriptions per 8-hour shift, an increase of 140% over previously attainable levels. Operational savings stemming from error reduction and maximized efficiency total more than $700,000 annually; estimated labor savings (including a 27% reduction in data entry staff) total about $725,000 per year. Obtaining payback on the system took 14 months.