Riverside Hospital's Pharmacy Services Case Solution And Analysis, HBR Case Study Solution & Analysis of Harvard Case Studies

Riverside Hospital's Pharmacy Services Case Solution

The population of the region in which the RDMH operate-sis mostly composed of older people, and has higher rate of hospitalization as compared to other regions. Prescribing the medication to geriatric patients is difficult for the physician at hospital, because these patients had generally suffered from more than one illness and reaction of different antibiotics increase the chances of death rate.
The availability and retention of health professionals is difficult for the organization. Due to the small number of beds, there were numerous challenges in ensuring that specialist care was available when needed.

Opportunities:

The organization has an opportunity to improve its medication process,which enables the organization to reduce the errors and have an ease in prescribing the medication dosage.
The organization can improve its technology in order to reduce the errors and further enhance the services.
Introduction of an advanced and safe medication management practices and process.
The implementation of new technology such as unit dose system and integration system would enable the organization to safe time, reduce complexity,cost and chances of error occurrence.
The organization can bring improvement in the medication process, which would enable the physicians to gain more knowledge about the patients’ past medication history as well as the other serious illness that the patients had suffered from prior to the current illness.
In order to provide more efficient services; the organization could engage in diversification through partnerships.

Threats:

Limited number of beds in hospital, while the increase of acute diseases in geriatric patients poses a threat for the organization as they might run of bed in case of excessive emergency cases etc.
Various errors were found in diagnosing and prescribing the medication, which has posed a big threat for the organization.
The limited availability of the funds resists the organization to use advanced technologies.

Strategic Analysis

Proposed Changes:

There are many options that can be considered to overcome the persisting issues. The first option is to introduce a unit dose system. A unit dose system is a medication dispensing system in which the doses are individually prepared and packed for each individual patient in a bubble pack, which are then labeled with the name of drug, patient, dose and the time the medication needs to be given to the patient. Moreover, each bubble has the medication for five days. The main goal is to reduce the errors in medications as well as the medication waste, along with the nursing time involved in dispensing the medications to the patients. As an addition, it will also reduce the inventory holding cost. The criteria would be to see if the system has reduced the errors and issues, and how much cost does it save and incur after following this system. (officals, Riverside Hospital's Pharmacy, 2016-17)

Even though the option might help in reducing the errors and might save the time that can be used in any other area of patient’s treatment, it isn’t cost effective and will incur more cost than the bulk purchasing. Moreover, it requires more labor as compared to bulk purchasing, which can be bought once and used for a long period of time.

Another option available is to apply the Bar-Code Medication and Administration system (BCMAS). This system has bar codes for each drug and for nurses as well as the patients. Through this system, the prescription which is written by the physician is then required to be hand delivered to the pharmacy, which then develops the bar-code that is attached with the unit dose. Also, the dose is then given to the nurse who would scan the bar with her identification badge along with the patient’s wristband.If all three match the dose that is given to the patients, and if all three don’t match then the nurse would easily identify the error. The goal and management criterion of applying this system is to reduce the errors committed during the treatment process, and to save time. This is done to alert when the error has been made and who overrides the error to dispense the medications to the patient. (officals, Riverside Hospital's Pharmacy, 2012-2013)

Even though the system can prevent wrong dispense of medications to the patients and would also warn the nurse if the bar-code is not matched to reduce the errors and also to record who overrides the warning of the system. However, the system is yet to be applied by any hospital in LHIN. By incurring such cost can turn out to be a disaster for the hospital. Also, in the study conducted on the system it has identified the errors human-make. With Government already considering to reduce the budgets of the hospitals, this system cost might act adversely for Riverside. (officials, Riverside Hospital's Pharmacy, 2011)

The third option for Riverside is to implement an Automated Pharmacy system. This system automates the unit dose packaging, and it dispenses the medications into the workstation and storage of the medications. It will work when a physician would enter the prescription into the hospital’s approved device and the medicines would be received by the workstation, and notify the workstation that the dosage is received. (officals, Riverside Hospital's Pharmacy, 2010-11)

The system hasn’t been adopted previously by any other hospital in LHIN; however it has been applied in other countries like the UK. In addition, it has reduced the number of errors and has also increased the efficiency by reducing the time for each technician for the prescription from 10-12 to 15 prescriptions in an hour. The cost to be incurred for implementing this system is high and it is hard to reverse the system because of the 5 years contract that is required to be signed. It also requires BCMAS system to work, which will increase the cost to the level that might not be possible for Riverside. It also has the negative side of not being able to store all kinds of medicines, and also has the problem of crashing down that will cause problems for the staff, who will then be obliged to fill the prescriptions manually. (officals, Riverside Hospital's Pharmacy, 2017..........................

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Riverside Hospital’s Pharmacy Services Harvard Case Solution & Analysis