Cvs Pharmacy Case Study

Enhancing Pharmacy Practice with Automated Dispensing Technology

REFILL 2 BY: 03/01/02

CVS/pharmacy Partners with Innovation Associates to Bring High Quality Dispensing to Their Patients

PHONE 607 798-9376

As an industry leader CVS/pharmacy has always been proactive in evaluating

and implementing various types of pharmacy automation technology. During the mid-90s, the chain developed a comprehensive technology assessment strategy and began evaluating various pharmacy service concepts, one of which was the Enhanced Workflow Pharmacy Automation (EWPA) Program. The charter of the EWPA Program was to migrate pharmacy workflow processing into a retail environment and to evaluate how various technologies such as workflow systems and automated prescription dispensing could increase efficiencies in CVS pharmacies.

CVS

case study

CVS/pharmacy is the leading drugstore chain Southeast, and Midwest regions of the country, covering 27 states and the District of Columbia. Founded in 1963,

in the United States with more than 4,100 stores in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic,

“The EWPA Program gravitated into our EPIC (Excellence in Pharmacy Innovation and Care) workflow system that is in place today,” says Rich Lynch, CVS’s Director, Retail Pharmacy Practice Design in their Healthcare Business Solutions group. “When EWPA was completed and the decision was made to go with EPIC, we also made some decisions about counting automation. Although we had been using some automated dispensing in our pharmacies, we wanted to re-evaluate the market and see whether we could improve our current situation.” CVS had specific goals in mind as they surveyed the field.They wanted to: enhance the quality of their prescription dispensing process; to find a solution that was both highly scalable for different volume levels and could easily fit into their multiple configurations; and to reduce the amount of time they spent on maintaining the dispensing equipment.

CVS/pharmacy...