Deploying lean in healthcare: Evaluating information technology effectiveness in U.S. hospital pharmacies

This case study provides a lens of operation research for evaluating the use of technology on medication distribution systems in U.S. hospital and helps better understand how technologies improve the healthcare operational performance in terms of processing time and cost. We analyze two prescribing technologies, namely no carbon required (NCR) and digital scanning technologies to quantify the advantages of the medication ordering, transcribing, and dispensing process in a multi-hospital health system. With comparison between these two technologies, the statistical analysis results show a significant reduction on process times by adopting digital scanning technology. The results indicated a reduction of 54.5% in queue time, 32.4% in order entry time, 76.9% in outgoing delay time, and 67.7% in outgoing transit time with the use of digital scanning technology. We also conducted a cost analysis on each of the two technologies, illustrating that the total cost generated by using digital scanning was as low as 37.31% of that generated by NCR. Lessons learned about how to evaluate IT effectiveness by lean methods are presented for both theoretical and practical perspectives.