Maximum return

Automated verification of pharmaceutical shipments pays for itself in 1 year with $2 million plus in savings.

-- Modern Materials Handling, 3/1/2001

Not many pharmacies single-handedly serve a population of 130,000, but that is exactly what the University of Texas Medical Branch/Texas Department of Criminal Justice does. Working 12 hours a day, 5 days a week, the pharmacy fills and distributes 220,000 prescriptions a month for 130,000 inmates at 140 locations.

Picking, checking, and shipping orders to prisons across Texas was a highly manual process that originally required 30 trained pharmacists. However, the use of bar codes and a high-speed scanning, sortation, and manifesting system (Accu-Sort Systems, 215-723-0981, www.accusort.com ) has automated the checking and shipping phases, eliminating the need to double the pharmacist workforce as the workload increased to current levels. According to Matthew Keith, pharmacy director, that led to a $2 million annual savings. In addition, the facility is now able to turn around orders routinely in 24 hours or even 12 hours when pressed.

Orders arrive at the pharmacy through an IBM 3090 host. Pharmacists review the prescriptions and release them to 12 filling stations. After picking, operators print and apply two bar code labels (Zebra Technologies, 847-634-6700, www.zebra.com ) with human readable data to the packaging of the picked items. Depending on the specific packaging, labels are applied to the top, front, or side of the item. One label includes patient information such as name and prison location. The other label includes type of medication, strength, dosage, and cost.

Picked items are then placed on a conveyor belt that carries them to the automated scanning, sortation, and manifesting system. The items first pass through a three-sided scanning array. An omni-directional scanner above the conveyor belt reads labels regardless of their orientation on top of the picked item. Another scanner reads bar codes on the front surface. A third scanner reads bar codes with picket-fence orientations on the side surface.

The scanners ensure that the information in the patient and drug labels match, eliminating the need for a manual check later by a pharmacist. The scanned information is also sent to sortation software that directs the item to one of 39 shipping lanes where it is diverted into bar coded totes for shipment. If the labels do not match up, the software diverts the item to a reject lane for manual correction and re-processing.

Two sets of orders are processed daily in four waves. At the end of each wave, the manifesting portion of the system prints manifests for attachment to each tote being shipped to a prison. A hand-held scanner then scans the bar codes on the manifest and the tote to ensure the two match.