From October 2007

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Giant Eagle implemented the Electronic Healthcare Record module and the Rx.com ePharmacy web engine in July. The ePharmacy web engine “will allow our pharmacy customers to go onto a secure site and look at their medication profile based on all the prescriptions they filled in our stores,” Heiser says.

“They’ll be able to do their own medication research, do their own drug interaction checks and, if they are considering adding a new drug to their drug regimen, they’ll be able to see what interactions may be present. They’ll also be able to arrange pick-ups in different locations.”

Patients will also be able to authorize their physician or other health care providers to access their prescription profiles.

As an Rx.com Alpha partner, Giant Eagle had significant input into how the software will operate within its enterprise. “It allowed us to incorporate a lot of our individual needs into the software without us having to build those applications on our own,” Heiser says.

As a quality measure, Giant Eagle has a policy called a “partnership check” that requires two pharmacists to verify the accuracy of a prescription before it is given to a patient. Not all locations have two pharmacists working at the same time, however, so one of the customized features the retailer asked Rx.com to design gives Giant Eagle the capability to have “visual partner checks done very smoothly” by pharmacists working at remote sites.

“If there are no customers waiting, and there are some prescriptions waiting for a pharmacist to look at as a second pair of eyes, they will be queued up automatically as that pharmacist’s next piece of work,” Heiser says. Pharmacists working from a central location or from their homes will also be able to view, process and verify prescriptions.

Through the centralized call center, pharmacists will work on “any processes that can be taken out of the store so the people in the stores will be able to concentrate on meeting the needs of the customers right in front of them,” Heiser says.

Identifying problems
Through its ability to load balance work processes across stores and districts, the enterprise software “will allow management to look at where the problems are,” Heiser says. Once those problems are identified, the district manager can determine where resources can be reallocated to help stores struggling with high volumes. “It gives us a dashboard look at the entire company broken out by division, market and individual stores,” he says.

Giant Eagle expects to see a return on its investment in three to five years, but ROI was not the only factor it considered before upgrading to EPS.

“There are competitive reasons pushing us toward this new technology,” Heiser says. “The major national drug stores have technologies that link their pharmacies, scan prescription images, scan bar codes for quality, signature capture, etc., and regional chains like ours have to keep up with what the national chains are doing.”

EPS “will also help us attract the best pharmacists we can because, with additional quality measures for accuracy in place, our pharmacists will be able to enjoy a very high comfort level.”

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