Business

BIS 311

Fall 2013

CASE STUDY:

SPECIALTY PHARMACEUTICAL SERVICES

This case will be the basis for Assignments 1 and 2.

Specialty Pharmaceutical Services provides pharmacy services to health-care delivery organizations that are too small to have their own in-house pharmacy. Its clients included nursing homes, residential rehabilitation facilities, psychiatric hospitals, and small specialty medical hospitals.

Specialty accepts pharmacy orders for patients in client facilities and delivers the orders in locked cases every 12 hours. Specialty employs delivery personnel, pharmacist’s assistants (PAs), licensed pharmacists, and office and clerical staff.

Personnel at each health-care facility submit patient prescription orders by telephone. Many prescriptions are standing orders, which are filled during every delivery cycle until specifically canceled. Orders are logged into a computer as they are received. At the start of each 12-hour shift, the computer generates case manifests for each floor or wing of each client facility. A case manifest identifies each patient and the drugs he or she has been prescribed, including when and how often the drugs should be administered. The shift supervisor assigns the case manifests to pharmacists who, in turn, assign tasks to pharmacy assistants (PAs). Pharmacists supervise and coordinate the PAs’ work.

All drugs for a single patient are collected in one plastic drawer of a locking case. Each case is marked with the institution’s name, floor number, and wing number (if applicable). Each drawer is marked with the patient’s name and room number. Dividers are inserted within a drawer to separate multiple prescriptions for the same patient. When all of the individual components of an order have been assembled, a pharmacist makes a final check of the contents, signs each page of the manifest, and places two copies of the manifest in the bottom of the case, one copy in a file cabinet in the assembly area, and the final...