From October 2007

By Liz Parks

Health care providers have long dreamed of creating a universal, centralized electronic database that would give patients and their authorized health care providers immediate access to all medical records from anywhere in the world.

Now Pittsburgh-based Giant Eagle, one of the country’s largest privately owned and family-operated food and drug store companies, is moving a step closer to realizing that dream, at least with respect to creating an electronic record of patient medication histories within the four walls of its corporate enterprise.

Having that capability will make Giant Eagle more competitive with national chains like Walgreens, CVS and Rite Aid, which have proprietary enterprise-wide patient medication history databases. It will also make it possible for Giant Eagle to participate in, contribute to and extract medication information from a universal patient medication database as that technology becomes a reality.

The same technology that Giant Eagle is using to create an enterprise-wide patient medication history also is allowing it to accept and send electronic prescribing transmissions and integrate advanced enterprise-wide workflow software directly into its new pharmacy information management system.

In a report released in July 2006, the Institute of Medicine recommended, as a way to help prevent the 1.5 million preventable medication errors estimated to occur in the United States annually, that all prescribers write prescription data electronically by 2010.

Enterprise-wide workflow will make it possible for Giant Eagle to enhance accuracy and efficiency by balancing pharmacy workloads across the entire chain, taking pressure off its busiest stores by routing some workload processes to pharmacists working at remote sites, including lower volume stores, a newly created pharmacy call center, as well as to pharmacists working from their homes.

Once fully deployed, Rx.com Enterprise Pharmacy System (EPS) “will allow us to greater define the various work tasks that need to be completed when filling a prescription,” says Randy Heiser, Giant Eagle’s vice president of pharmacy.

Instead of store-level pharmacists and technicians sharing work processes that can create redundancies and inefficiencies, each task or process will be assigned to specific individuals. That process also will provide extra levels of checks and balances to prevent medication-dispensing errors.

Defining the task, says Heiser, “ensures that we have the right person, matched by their skill sets, doing the assigned task. That will mean we won’t have high-salaried pharmacists spending their time on lower-level tasks, freeing them up to handle higher-level tasks like managing a patient’s medication regimen.”

It also will provide the ability to balance workflow through the entire enterprise, making it possible for pharmacists in new stores with relatively low volumes of prescriptions to handle some workload tasks for more-established, higher-volume stores.

“That lets us provide a high level of customer service as well as a very high level of medication dispensing safety and accuracy,” Heiser says. “It gives us the best chance in the industry of having as few errors as possible.”

EPS was developed by Fort Worth, Texas-based Rx.com, an affiliate of pharmacy technology provider PDX and NHIN, a provider of submission and reconciliation services. Rx.com offers an integrated suite of pharmacy technology solutions, including modules for managing retail-based mail order and centralized prescription filling, centralized workflow, web-enabled health care records and centralized data files.

There also is a module to enable e-prescribing – sending and receiving electronic prescriptions – and a Medication Therapy Management (MTM) pharmaceutical manufacturer performance program that is based on a pharmacist’s ability to enhance adherence and compliance to prescribed medications.

Alpha partners
Rx.com currently has about 3,000 stores using the Electronic Healthcare record and estimates that as many as 6,000 stores will be live within 18 months – including 4,000 that will be running the Rx.com Enterprise Pharmacy System that Giant Eagle is installing.

As one of the Rx.com Alpha partners, Giant Eagle spent three years helping to develop the technology that supports EPS. The first Giant Eagle pharmacy went live with EPS in January, and Heiser says the system should be in place chainwide by the end of the year.

All patient medication records will continue to be stored at individual Giant Eagle pharmacies, but those records will also be stored in the Rx.com central database at a secure co-location facility with built-in redundancy.

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