Community pharmacies are an important part of the overall healthcare network. Traditionally, community pharmacies have only been considered as locations where patients pickup medications. However, there is a tremendous opportunity to provide patient education that can improve medication adherence and ensure that patients know how to properly use their medications. The key to providing patient education is having sufficient pharmacist resources. In this talk we discuss several different strategies that can be used to provide greater pharmacist capacity. Examples include: alternative staffing strategies, predicting prescription abandonment, and obtaining and utilizing different degrees of knowledge about when patients will pick up prescriptions. We create a community pharmacy simulation model to evaluate these different strategies.
Bryan A. Norman is Professor and Chair of the Department of Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering at Texas Tech University. Dr. Norman has over twenty years of experience in process and operations improvement and optimizing the performance of logistics systems including process flow, facility layout, scheduling, and supply chain design. He has applied his work in manufacturing, retail, service and healthcare settings. Dr. Norman’s research in healthcare delivery spans three primary domains: supply chain design and operation, staffing and scheduling, and coordinating and improving process flow. He is the author of over 60 journal publications and has presented more than 100 seminars, invited lectures, and conference presentations. He has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Veteran’s Administration, the Gates Foundation, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and other industry partners.