Homework 3 (3 points)
- To be completed individually or in pairs
- Submit as a PDF, Word or OpenOffice document, using the homework submission button.
This homework refers to the pharmacy prescription fulfillment scenario that you modeled and analyzed in Homework 1 and Homework 2.
We have seen in Homework 2 that the following are two major issues in the "as is" process:
- Customers who arrive at peaks times (shortly after 5pm) have to wait, whereas this is exactly what they wanted to avoid by dropping their prescription in the morning hours or submitting it online. Who wants to be kept waiting in a queue for 10+ minutes after being promised that the prescriptions would be ready at 5pm?
- Even worst, orders are not ready when customers arrive to pick them up, for various reasons analyzed in homework 2.
- Customers are often surprised to find out they have to pay more than expected for their prescription.
Task:
Propose changes to the prescription fulfillment process to address the above issues. Each change you propose should include:
- A brief description of the change (what part of the process is being changed and how it is being changed)
- A justification of the change: Why do you believe this change would address this issue and to what extent do you think the issue will be addressed? In the justification of the change, you may refer to your previous issue analysis (homework 2) as well as the reengineering principles and/or the redesign heuristics introduced in the Process Redesign lectures.
- An analysis of the feasibility of the change. Try to answer the following questions: Are these any upfront (capital) costs to put in place this change? How much upfront cost is necessary? Does the change has an effect on resource costs (would the pharmacy need to pay more to staff a pharmacy?).
When proposing changes, please take the following into consideration:
- When delivering prescription drugs, the pharmacy must ensure that someone has checked the identity of the person to whom the drugs are delivered. Drugs can only be delivered to the person to whom the prescription was issued. None of the proposed changes should introduce a risk that drugs are delivered without an ID check, using an ID document with a photo of the holder. As of 2021, reliable technology for automated photo ID check via biometrics is costly and requires careful handling of biometrics data (due to privacy regulations). These are the reasons why this technology is currently only in use in specific applications such as passport controls at airports. However, remote ID checks in the style of those offered by companies such as Veriff are more widely used.
- The pharmacist is legally responsible for ensuring that a patient does not receive a harmful drug, given the knowledge that the pharmacy has about a given customer (e.g. knowledge about previous drugs that the patient has been served by the pharmacy). Even if the prescribing doctor makes a mistake, the pharmacist also has a legal liability in case they deliver or they authorize the delivery of an unsafe drug to a customer. In addition, the reputational damage to the pharmacy would be very high if they deliver harmful drugs, and they had a way of detecting this potential harm before delivering the drugs.