Pharmacy design should incorporate improvements aimed at providing faster, more accurate service to improve the safety and comfort of patients. Array Advisors works with pharmacy clients to do just that. A recent project took Array to a MidAtlantic academic medical center to investigate the consolidation of three compounding pharmacies by analyzing their current state and future compounding throughput needs.The client also asked us to study their main pharmacy from both a flow standpoint and space allocation needs to access both current and future state. Both of these resulted in an approximately 15,000 square foot potential pharmacy consolidation program that would assist this medical center with not only better efficiencies, but also future growth needs.
Our client had been experiencing facility-related and operational challenges in three pharmacies operating in different locations on the main campus. They requested our services to study the operational and facility-related factors and to consider if these separately operated spaces should be consolidated into a single facility to be located within newly vacated space on the main campus.
Array received data from each of the three pharmacies for compounding volumes.The Medical Center collected some of the data manually and extracted some from electronic medical records. Our Healthcare Systems Engineer analyzed the data to determine the current daily compounding volumes for each pharmacy. Array used this information to develop a simulation model for testing more efficient workflows.
We compared each of the volumes in a simulation model of the data, ensuring that the model accurately represented the current state of pharmacy compounding operations. After validating the simulation model, we tested new workflows with a focus on consolidating the three compounding pharmacy areas into a consolidated space, allowing for more flexible resource utilization.
The simulation model allowed staff to better understand the impact of combining the separate workflows into a single pharmacy operation. It also helped illustrate how the number of available resources affected the efficiency of the System’s performance.
In the case study below, learn more about the pharmacy challenges with which we were faced and uncover the results from our simulation studies.
Blog authored by Kristy Venrick, former laboratory planner with Array.