About The Project
We were approached by the Vice President of Pharmacy Services, who knew a part of his business inside and out from a previous job, but was currently paying a consulting firm $75k/month in fees. A corporate initiative came down that in three months his business would double and by the end of the year it would triple, meaning his consulting fees would be nearly $225k/month ($2.7 million per year).
He wanted to cut the vendor out but did not want to staff up to a level that ate away his cost savings. The nature of the business was that auditors would visit pharmacies and collect copies of prescriptions to bring back for audit (called a “site audit”).
We sent our team to visit the company on site and reviewed their current process with the Vice President. The overhead of sending employees on the road was high, and any time we could save so auditors could visit more pharmacies in a day would be valuable. Additionally, the current process introduced manual steps that took time, and the auditors back at the home office had to wait until the end of the day for the data to be ready for them to start the audit. We found the following issues with their existing process:
- Auditors went on site and collected data on paper and physical scans of the prescription
- Upon return to the office, they manually entered data and uploaded the scans
- Scans had to be manually associated with the audit as supporting documentation
- Auditors and reviewers had to wait until data entry was complete before starting their work
t was clear that the employees visiting the pharmacies needed a more efficient way to gather data and associate the scans with the audit so they would have more time to visit more pharmacies each day. It was also clear that as soon as a pharmacy visit was complete, auditors at the home office had to be able to begin work on that audit. We designed a secure mobile solution using tablets that would solve both problems and ensure HIPAA compliance with the prescription data on the mobile device.
Result/Outcome
We created a software application for internet-enabled tablet devices (Android based) that provided GPS based directions to get to the pharmacy with a list of the scripts that were being audited. The data was entered directly into the software for each prescription, and photos of the scripts were taken with the tablet and automatically associated with the corresponding claim. As soon as the audit was complete, the data and photos were uploaded to the secure cloud using HIPAA compliant encryption. The auditors in the home office were immediately able to begin the audit, and the auditor was already on their way to the next pharmacy, without having to do any manually data entry or document association.
The client was able to cut out the vendor entirely and is now growing their on-site audit business.
