The ROI of Light Guided Automated Will Call

In the healthcare industry, “cost” can be a dirty word. It can be a challenge as a Director of Pharmacy, IT Manager or Staff Member to justify the cost of new technology that provides convenience, efficiency, and improves morale. 

“What’s wrong with what we’ve always used? What’s the point in making such a big change?” 

Change can be difficult, but the cost of new technology is usually worth it. Especially because, for a minimal cost, the solution could end up saving you thousands of dollars every year. For example, our light guided automated will call solution saves pharmacies time and a lot of money. 

Consider the average costs of misplaced prescriptions: 

• A pharmacy with 250+ fills per day will misplace 12 of those prescriptions each day. 
• A staff member will spend 9.6 minutes locating each one of those misplaced prescriptions. 

Lighted Bags provide an average 75% reduction in misplaced prescriptions with an average of 86 minutes saved per day. That’s nearly 43 hours saved per month. With the average pharmacist being paid $60/hour, and a tech at $14/hour, those time savings directly translate to major cost savings for your organization. And even when a prescription is correctly filled and put away in a non-automated bin management system, the average retrieval time is 49.8 seconds per bag.  

Lighted Bags can reduce that average retrieval time to just 15 seconds. If your pharmacy is retrieving 250 prescriptions a day, that equates to a time savings of 2.5 hours every day.  Even if all of those retrievals are performed by a tech at $14/hour, that’s nearly $900/month in cost savings. 

Finally, let’s talk about everyone’s least favorite pharmacy task: Return to Stock. With national drug shortages, it’s more important than ever to efficiently manage your prescription inventory. However, because of the large amount of time it can take to hunt down all of those RTS prescriptions, an average pharmacy may only perform Return to Stock every 10 days. The average daily Return to Stock list is around 17 prescriptions. The average retrieval time per RTS bag is about 50 seconds. That adds up to nearly 15 minutes per day spent finding those bags for Return to Stock.  With Lighted Bags, the average time to locate all of those 17 RTS prescriptions is one minute. That’s over 5 ½ hours saved per month on Return to Stock alone. 

To wrap it up, a solution like light-guided automated will call can save a pharmacy ~88 hours per month:

• Misplaced Prescriptions: ~43 hours per month
• Prescription Retrieval: ~50 hours per month
• Return to Stock: ~5 hours per month 

More often than not, a technology solution like Emporos for outpatient pharmacies can end up saving your pharmacy thousands of dollars - even with a cost upfront.

Interested in our Lighted Bags offering? Give us a shout at hello@emporos.net and we’ll follow up with the information you need.