INSTRUCTION: Critically answer the case study questions given.
Pharmacy Prescription Process
Consider the following process at a pharmacy overseas:
Customers drop off their prescriptions either in the drive-through counter or in the front counter of the pharmacy. When dropping their prescription, a technician asks the customer for a pick-up time and puts the prescription in a box labelled with the hour of the pick-up time. Every hour, one of the pharmacy technicians picks up the prescriptions due to be filled in the current hour. The technician then enters the details of each prescription (e.g. doctor’s details, patient details and medication details) into the pharmacy system. As soon as the details of the prescriptions are entered, the pharmacy then performs an automated check called Drug Utilization Review (DUR). This check is meant to determine if the prescription contains any drugs that may be incompatible with other drugs that had been dispensed to the same customer in the past, or drugs that may be inappropriate to the customer. Any alarms raised during the automated DUR are reviewed by a pharmacist who performs a more thorough check. In some cases, the pharmacist even has to call the doctor who issued the prescription in order to confirm it. After the DUR, the system performs an insurance check in order to determine whether the customer’s insurance policy will pay for part or for the whole cost of the drugs. In most cases, the output of this check is that the insurance company would pay for a certain percentage of the costs, while the customer has to pay for the remaining part (also called the co-payment). Once the prescription passes the insurance check, it is assigned to a technician who collects the drugs from the shelves and puts them in a bag with the prescription stapled to it. After the technician has filled a given prescription, the bag is passed to the pharmacist who double-checks that the prescription has been filled correctly. After this quality check, the pharmacist seals the bag and puts it in the pick-up area. When a customer arrives to pick up a prescription, a technician retrieves the prescription and asks the customer for payment in case the drugs in the prescription are not (fully) covered by the customer’s insurance
Question 1
Draw an as-is diagram for the above process (30marks)
