Innovation, BU WISE publish paper on Rx operations optimization
JOHNSON CITY, N.Y. — Pharmacy intelligence and automation company Innovation announced Wednesday that a collaborative thesis paper by its Advanced Systems division and Binghamton University’s Watson Institute for Systems Excellence (BU WISE) had been published in Expert Systems With Applications, a leading journal on artificial intelligence.
The paper, “Pharmacy Robotic Dispensing and Planogram Analysis Using Association Rule Mining with Prescription Data,” provides details on an approach to determining prescribed medication associations in a high-volume pharmacy. It incorporates research touting the positive effects of a technique that uses an optimal fulfillment location for a medication based on how frequently it is associated with another medication. The effects include a reduction in the overall processing cost of dispensing a pharmacy’s inventory.
“In this research, we applied big-data analytics to enhance the efficiency of pharmacy automation and management by finding different rules and patterns of subscribed medications,” Binghamton University assistant professor Dr. Sangwon Yoon said.
Yoon added that the research can be applied to enhance pharmacy automation technology and management, as well as to understand adherence and compliance in the future.
“This important paper is evidence of the practical advantages possible when academia and industry focus together on important challenges,” Innovation COO Tom Boyer said. “Innovation and our partners at Binghamton University are committed to the adoption and integration of emerging technologies and proven industrial best practices. The valuable improvements in pharmacy operations that result produce significant benefits to our customers and, most importantly, the patients they serve.”
Innovation has also teamed with BU WISE on a two-day symposium, “Exploring Successful Change Management for Pharmacy Operations,” which will be held April 9 and 10 at Binghamton University. The symposium will use industry lessons and methodologies and relate them to pharmacy operations.
“Our partnership with Innovation, a leader in pharmacy automation, provides our graduate students and faculty with great opportunities to test some of their newly developed algorithms,” said Dr. Mohammad Khasawneh, Binghamton University professor and BU WISE associate director. “In addition to accomplishing significant return on investment for our industry partners, collaborative efforts like (this paper) are indeed critical to our educational mission at the university.”