Implementation of an Automated Phone Call Distribution System in an Inpatient Pharmacy Setting
Background: Inpatient pharmacies receive numerous phone calls from health care professionals and patients. This uncaptured workload poses potential staffing concerns for pharmacy administrators as unequal distribution or misdirected calls to the pharmacy team can lead to accountability and patient safety concerns. We aimed to implement and evaluate the effectiveness of an automated call distribution (ACD) system in an inpatient pharmacy setting at a US Department of Veterans Affairs hospital.
Observations: A new inpatient pharmacy service phone line extension was implemented at the Edward Hines, Jr. Veterans Affairs Hospital in Illinois. The ACD phone system yielded positive performance metrics, including ≤ 30 seconds mean speed to answer and ≤ 5% abandonment rate in the 12 months after implementation.
Conclusions: The ACD phone system is a promising, new application of available technology implemented in a nontraditional setting. The ACD system provides more actionable information and quality metrics data to pharmacy leadership. The implementation of the ACD system has improved accountability, efficiency, work distribution, and the allocation of resources.
The pharmacy leadership team plans on using reports for pharmacy team members to monitor performance. Reports on individual agent activity capture workload; this may be used as a performance-related metric for future performance plans.
Conclusions
The inpatient pharmacy ACD phone system at EHJVAH is a promising application of available technology. The implementation of the ACD system improved accountability, efficiency, work distribution, and the allocation of resources in the inpatient pharmacy service. The ACD phone system has yielded positive performance metrics including mean speed to answer ≤ 30 seconds and abandonment rate ≤ 5% over 12 months after implementation. With time, users of the inpatient pharmacy ACD phone system will become more comfortable with the technology, thus further improving the patient health care quality.
