Pagoda
Consulting
Group
We are a small group of IT professionals who have focused on the long-term care pharmacy market for most of our careers. We average 38 years per person in IT, with an average of 35 of those years in LTC pharmacy software.
We have each held company leadership roles, giving us experience in planning, strategy, finance, sales and project management to complement our software development skills. We are at our best when we are working with the pharmacy operations leadership team to understand their business challenges and offer technology solutions, and then providing technical expertise and direction to software development projects.
Our skills
Along with our gaining a deep understanding of the LTC pharmacy business, we have demonstrated these skills in our careers:
Experience and expertise with multiple pharmacy dispensing systems, including FrameworkLTC from SoftWriters
Software architecture and design, include web-based applications and mobile apps
User experience definition and design
Application integration design and strategy
Interfacing pharmacy applications to adjunct products such as dispensing machines, delivery applications and data services
Electronic prescribing and related standards (HL7 and NCPDP Script)
Gathering requirements and getting business sponsor buy-in
Directing in-house or third-party development efforts
SQL database coding, including developing stored procedures and functions
Quality assurance testing oversight
Project management
Change management, including Change Control Board (CAB) practices and standards
Product management of customer-facing web portals and mobile apps
Creating and managing IT security policies, procedures and associated controls
Data warehouse design, including ETL process design
SharePoint site design and administration
Evaluating new technologies
Implementing IT best practices and standards
ITIL certification (Foundation in IT Service Management; Intermediate Service Design)
We specialize in Enterprise Applications
No LTC pharmacy application provides all the capabilities that a pharmacy needs to run its business. We are experts in architecting and building adjunct applications that tap into the existing information already maintained by the LTCP application and supplementing it with information and functionality that provides a powerful complement to that application.
They following are examples of applications that illustrate this Enterprise Application concept and are just some of the ones we have architected and built in the past.
Enterprise Order Workflow Dashboards - Pharmacies need to have a macro view of order fulfillment so that bottlenecks can be identified and resources applied in the right places at the right time. This extends to an enterprise that is composed of multiple pharmacies. Enterprise dashboards take data from multiple pharmacy database instances as well as multiple different applications to form a unified view of this information. We have experience architecting and building dashboards to fulfill this need.
Business Intelligence Reporting - There is data, and then there is information. We have worked with senior company leaders to determine what information is most critical to monitoring the business from an operational and financial viewpoint. Custom data extracts are built and modern data visualization tools employed to bring forth the most important information needed to run the business.
Interfaces to Other Applications and Automated Machines - Successful businesses connect best-of-breed products together to provide exceptional solutions. New applications and systems come on the market fairly regularly, and many times these are not supported natively by the pharmacy application. We have experience architecting and building interfaces and understand how they should fit into the pharmacy’s order fulfillment process. We are familiar with all the common interface standards used in this business (HL7, X12, Script, NCPDP, etc.). We also have crafted many interfaces using proprietary data formats.
Enterprise Inventory Management - View and maintain inventory centrally, maintain automatic substitution rules, message purchasing and leadership staff when a change is made to a product, and provide an audit of all changes made across all pharmacies.
Enterprise Data Management - Most multi-pharmacy enterprises want to keep tight control on information that drives the business. This "master data" includes pricing tables, patient category codes, method of payment codes, etc. Controlling your master data makes it easier for enterprise wide best practices and enables enterprise reporting.
Delivery Tracking and Advanced Shipping Notices - For LTCP pharmacies, on-time delivery is a key metric to get and retain business. This requires software to track a package from the pharmacy to the customer. We are experts at building software to connect the pharmacy order and shipping information with the data tracked by the courier service that enable delivery tracking dashboards directed to three different audiences: the pharmacy shipping staff, the customer, and the pharmacy customer service team.