This standardization of process can reach far beyond the actual medications a pharmacy dispenses, and can apply to the flow of information about a medication and the patient taking it - ideally, through the digitization of documents by scanning or by receiving them electronically to begin with.
"Workflow should offer a bird's-eye view of all information associated with a prescription and patient," says Integra's Foster.
The prescription order itself is a basic piece of this information, but not the only one. Foster offers several examples of situations when documents need to be rapidly and easily retrieved by staff, whether they worked on the order originally or not. For instance, a doctor may call to discuss clinical areas, or the pharmacy may want to make information available to pharmacists to view remotely during on-call times. Then there's the enhanced triage and automated routing available when an emphasis is placed on document management.
"Pharmacies can pre-prioritize incoming orders based on long-term care facility, date, time, and day of week," says Foster. "And we also offer the ability to apply static bar codes to pre-identify forms and dynamic bar codes that tag outgoing documents so that they are automatically routed through the workflow on reentry to the system."
FULL ARTICLE CAN BE FOUND ON THE COMPUTER TALK FOR THE PHARMACIST WEB SITE AT: Click here to be redirected to the ComputerTalk Web site