Show Me The Money

Fairview/University of Minnesota Health System, headquartered in Minneapolis, is one of the largest and most progressive integrated health networks in the country. It owns and operates dozens of outpatient clinics and other health care facilities throughout Minnesota and adjoining states.

Most of its outpatient facilities's prescription volumes aren’t large enough to cost-justify a brick-and-mortar pharmacy, or even the services of an onsite pharmacist. Consequently, when patients received a prescription, they had to have it filled somewhere else and Fairview lost significant potential prescription revenue.

In late 1998, Fairview installed Telepharmacy Solutions outpatient point-of-care dispensing units in one of its clinics. The positive benefits impressed management so much that four more were quickly ordered. And other units soon followed. All of the units are functioning at very low cost and generating substantial new incremental revenue from patient prescriptions which in the past were lost.