“We were at a crossroads with our technology as our existing automation system’s contract was coming to a close. As always, patient safety is our highest priority and we felt strongly that Innovation’s technology suite offered our pharmacies the most comprehensive patient safety features,” said Director, Pharmacy Services, Vivian Bradley Johnson, PharmD., MBA, Parkland Health & Hospital System. “From an efficiency standpoint, having the Symphony workflow as our hub has added much needed structure and has helped us streamline our entire fulfillment process, enabling us to reduce our turnaround times by around 30%.”

To fill an average of 6000 prescriptions daily across nine sites, the pharmacies use Symphony integrated with their Cerner PharmNet® pharmacy management system as their process control center. The sites employ Symphony workstations throughout their workflow for order entry, Rx imaging, Rx filling (both auto and manual), verification, will call, and patient pickup. Innovation has also worked closely with Parkland’s pharmacy operations team to custom develop a will call bin management solution that provides fast accurate retrieval of prescriptions for patient pickup. Seven pharmacy sites complement the Symphony workflow with Innovation’s scalable counting technology (in 50-dispenser increments). The two highest volume pharmacies employ 140-dispenser ROBOTx systems, which process up to 240 prescriptions an hour.

“Another key factor for our higher volume pharmacies is that the Symphony+ and ROBOTx systems allow us to perform medication changeovers simply through onsite, software-controlled dispenser calibration. We used to have to return cells to the vendor for changeovers,” said Johnson. “The technology’s flexibility and ease of use is extremely important to us because our 340B status often requires fairly frequent medication changeovers involving generics that help us contain costs.”

“Parkland now has a completely integrated and scalable technology backbone for their entire pharmacy operation, and they have wisely right-sized their various volume tiers using just the right amount of counting or robotics technology,” said John Wilson, division vice president, institutional sales, Innovation. “Parkland’s multi-site implementation is a great example of how a hospital system can employ a common sense automation strategy to achieve their patient safety and cost containment initiatives.”

About Innovation Associates
Innovation Associates, Inc., a leader in the world of automated prescription dispensing, offers the PharmASSIST family of products to address the prescription growth, quality assurance, pharmacy workflow, and cost control challenges of all size pharmacies. With over three decades of broad-based, business experience, Innovation Associates is dedicated to delivering the highest-quality pharmacy automation products to the pharmacy industry. For more information on Innovation Associates, Inc., visit www.innovat.com.

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