Pharmacy Service Improvement at Cvs

Business 2710

Assignment #2

Pharmacy Service Improvement at CVS

1. The first “Customer Value Store” (CVS) opened in 1963 and grew quickly after that. By 2002, CVS was one of the largest retail drugstores in America. However, as the company grew managers began to worry that the pharmacy operations were not performing well. It was then that CVS launched a Pharmacy Service Initiative (PSI) to understand the exact condition of the pharmacy’s customer service and to make any required changes. After completing many interviews and undertaking lots of analysis and fieldwork, the PSI team found that virtually all CVS pharmacies followed the same steps to fill prescriptions and that all experienced the same results. This fulfillment process consisted of five basic steps, the drop-off, data entry, production, quality assurance and pick-up.

In the first step, the drop-off, customers drop off their prescription and a technician asks when they will be returning to pick it up. The tech then writes the requested pick-up time on the script and places it in a box. This box is divided into slots according to pick-up time periods and the tech places the script in the slot that contains the hour before the customers desired pick up time. If the customer requests to have their prescription filled immediately, the tech places the script in the current time period slot.

In the next step, the data entry, the tech takes the current hours scripts from the box and enters its required data in the pharmacy information system such as the contacts information, data about any third-party payers and the specifics of the prescription. The system then performs an automated drug utilization review (DUR) which checks the drugs against all other prescriptions in the database for the specific patient to ensure that no harmful drug-drug interactions will occur. As well, it checks to make sure that the drug is appropriate for the patient given the demographic data stored in the system. If a...