Amalgamated Healthcare, a key distributor of pharmaceuticals to local and provincial hospital pharmacies in SA, has chosen Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server software as its access infrastructure solution as part of a strategy to deploy information faster to its customers, thereby reducing costs and increasing accuracy.
Amalgamated Healthcare`s Limpopo depot is in the process of deploying Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server to help roll-out its in-house pharmaceutical distribution software to its customers in an effort to reduce bandwidth and distribution costs and keep pricing information up to date. Once the deployment is complete, the Limpopo depot will serve as a showcase for Amalgamated Healthcare`s three other distribution depots in Mpumalanga and North West, which are expected to adopt the Citrix solution.
Danny Vermaak, IT manager of the Limpopo depot, says the primary driver for implementing Citrix access infrastructure was solving the challenge of disseminating pricing information to hospital pharmacies quickly and cost-effectively. Amalgamated Healthcare`s Limpopo depot serves a number of geographically separated provincial hospitals. Previously, to ensure each hospital had the latest pricing information for medicines, the depot relied on a system of delivering stiffy disks to hospitals in person, which generated high travel costs, and high levels of inaccuracy once orders are placed by pharmacists.
Medicine prices change at least monthly (sometimes more often), and therefore each pharmacy had to receive a new disk every month. Since there was no guarantee that any particular pharmacy would have the latest pricing information available, there was no way of ensuring that incoming orders made use of the correct pricing structures. This resulted in orders having to be amended once they were received, faxed back for confirmation and a new order number, and then recaptured on return, leading to a great margin for error. Also, orders were hand-written and faxed through, resulting in the possibility of errors during the manual capturing process. This led to duplication of work, and concomitant high administrative costs. It was also expensive to physically distribute the disks.
"Getting price updates to hospitals meant that my two technicians were constantly on the road," says Vermaak. "In the Waterberg region alone we are saving between 10 and 20 trips per month, each averaging between 300km and 400km."
Even with the current partial deployment, Vermaak says Amalgamated Healthcare is saving around R6 000 per month in travel costs alone.
The roll-out to 90 users in 44 hospitals started about a year ago, and is currently held up due to physical network shortages, as the South African government and Amalgamated Healthcare work together to get all hospitals online.
"We are waiting for all the hospitals to get connected to the Internet, and should complete the roll-out within the next quarter," says Vermaak.
The solution has also allowed Amalgamated Healthcare to simplify its ordering process. Hospital pharmacists no longer have to fax through orders, but can place their orders electronically. "We have much less finger trouble now," Vermaak comments jokingly.
Before choosing Citrix, Vermaak investigated the impact of different systems, and found that with a Citrix solution, he would be saving bandwidth. (Although the hospitals pay for their own bandwidth, Amalgamated Healthcare has a number of internal users of the solution.) "Citrix uses about 2.5MB of bandwidth over the whole day. By contrast, competing products used as much as 4MB in just three hours," he says.
"I don`t think another product would have been able to deliver what Citrix has delivered to us," he says.
While the overall roll-out to hospital pharmacies is ongoing, Vermaak says the implementation or Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server on the server farm was "easy".
The solution serves about 35 administrative users at the Limpopo depot, and 30 users at hospitals. Once the roll-out is complete, there will be 90 hospital users.
"The users in hospitals are generally pharmacists, and are therefore not necessarily technology literate. The Citrix interface is easy for them to understand and use, and has helped us reduce errors," says Vermaak. Currently 12 hospitals are online, but once the solution is complete, 44 hospitals will be part of the roll-out.
Once the network connections to hospitals are rolled out, each hospital will make use of a wireless connection to the Internet, using IEEE 802.11b equipment, to connect to Amalgamated Healthcare`s pricing application.
Amalgamated Healthcare serves Microsoft Office, AccPac, Microsoft Outlook Microsoft Explorer and its own in-house pharmaceutical distribution software called PDSX to its internal users with the help of Citrix. PDSX is served to hospitals using Citrix.
The system uses two Citrix servers and eight application and mail servers, 32 PCs at the depot, and 110 PCs in hospitals. The specifications on these machines were part of the motivation for using Citrix, says Vermaak. "Some of the hospital pharmacies still use 486 machines with only 16MB of RAM. We needed a solution that would serve all our customers irrespective of the technology they have available in their PCs."
"On Citrix we`re running Windows 2000 internally, but at the hospitals they use either Windows 95 or Windows 98, with only one or two XP users in the field," Vermaak comments. The Citrix solution allows the older machines at hospitals to access the latest applications, irrespective of their processing power.
Plans are in place to allow medical professionals at primary healthcare clinics - where there are not necessarily telephone lines - to dial into the system using their cellular phones and notebook computers.
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