Case Study

Providing the Same Standard of Care – Even at the Bottom of the Grand Canyon

Enabling remote and after-hours dispensing and extending telepharmacy at point-of-care.

Overview

Parker PHS Indian Hospital, located in Parker, Arizona, is dedicated to providing quality health care to the members of five Native American tribes. Colorado River Service Unit serves nearly 13,000 members in the tribal communities of Parker, Arizona. Parker PHS Indian Hospital provides general medical care, pediatric care, specialty outpatient services, and comprehensive pharmaceutical care and support.

Providing proper pharmacy services and support to remote populations is a challenge all rural community health centers face. Arizona’s harsh and inhospitable landscape, coupled with the distances between the Indian villages it serves, made it an even more difficult task for Parker PHS Indian Hospital. However, without comprehensive pharmaceutical care, their patients and providers faced a continued lowering standard of care, decreases in medical adherence, plus the certainty of ever worsening outcomes.

Solution

Prior to the implementation of PickPoint®’s Remote Dispensing System, Parker would fill prescriptions at one of its Phoenix area pharmacies and send them via mule to the Supai clinic for dispensing to patients. This process took days to complete, severely impacting patient care and compliance.

With PickPoint®’s Remote Dispensing System, prescriptions are now e-prescribed from the Supai clinic back to the Phoenix area pharmacy for processing. Once complete, the prescription label is printed at the Supai clinic. The Supai clinic health care provider retrieves the prescription label and scans the bar code in the PickPoint® Remote Dispensing System, causing the correct medication to be dispensed form the cabinet. The medication is then labeled and dispensed to the patient, in minutes rather than days.

PickPoint® Remote Dispensing System accommodates for most common bottle and package sizes – the large cabinet they selected stores up to 90 rows (1,080 individual SKUs) of prepackaged items. (Smaller cabinet available stores up to 54 rows (648 individual SKUs) of prepackaged items.)

Plus, it provided these immediate benefits:

  • Improve medication security, accountability, and dispensing
  • Pharmacists review all prescriptions before loading and dispensing
  • Takes care of patients at the clinic immediately
  • Increased Rx capture rate with direct point-of-care dispensing
  • Provide pharmacy services at a fraction of the cost
  • Improved inventory management and turns

Tested & Approved

While the concept of remote dispensing was a simple decision for Parker PHS, picking a proven partner was an even easier one! Thanks to the PickPoint® Remote Dispensing System’s proven track record of success, it has delivered vastly improved pharmaceutical care to IHS Health Centers including over 120 locations in Alaska alone.

Plus, the PickPoint® Remote Dispensing System met these requirements:

  • Joint Commission and HIPAA-compliant
  • Meets the Same Standard of Care
  • Available on ECAT
  • DoD Certified Security Protocols
  • Interface agnostic
  • SOC 2 Type 2 compliance
  • In use by over 140 sites worldwide

Service & Support

Parker PHS also required a partner who would be there every step of the way – including system planning, delivery, installation, training, and ongoing support. PickPoint® exceeded expectations and overcame the challenges that Parker Health Center’s remote location provides – including helicoptering the equipment and installation team down to the clinic at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. PickPoint® was able to install their 2 Remote Dispensing Systems and provide training to clinic staff and pharmacy within 3 days.

Result: Improved Pharmacy Operations

Pharmacy & Clinic Operations | Financial Improvement | Compliance Made Easy | Information Technology

Lessons Learned & Conclusion

“The opening of the new Supai Health Station is a momentous accomplishment that has been in the works for two decades. In one of the world’s most remote locations, we are improving access to care and delivering a state-of-the-art health care facility at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.”
– IHS Director Roselyn Tso

Take the power of your pharmacy team further with the PickPoint® Remote Dispensing System. PickPoint® makes it easy for you to add remote dispensing to your clinics and points-of-care facilities. Learn more at PickPoint.com.