Allison Grant & Nicole Banahene 
NC MedAssist staff member using the SharePoint form.
See PDF of Project Update Snapshot.
NC Medassist approached Apparo in early 2018 for help overcoming a burdensome paper-based program that they were using for tracking customers who came to their mobile pharmacies. Apparo matched them to a volunteer team from Cardinal Innovations who developed a SharePoint-based solution. Allison Grant, Project Manager from Apparo, facilitated the project.
The form was implemented in NC MedAssist’s new Over-the-Counter Medicine Free Store from the day it opened and enables them to serve three times as many customers as they anticipated. “The store opened in July 2018 and we expected about 300 visitors a month. We’ve actually had around 1,000 per month, serving over 12,000 in our first year. We could not have served so many with our paper-based system. We need the SharePoint form to be sure that each customer only comes once per month and that they are not stocking up heavily any one type of medication which would be a sign of misuse,” explains Nicole Banahene, Director of Partner Relations, NC MedAssist.
She continues to explain additional benefits of the form:
- Improved service to constituents: “We track whether customers in the store have medical insurance. If they do not, we offer them our free prescription pharmacy services.”
- Ease of use for their transitional staff: “We partner with Goodwill and their transitional job training program, so each of our store employees is only with us for 120 days. The form is easy to train and use.
- Ease of tracking key metrics for funders: “Funders want the numerical data that we collect in our form, like number of those uninsured, those on Medicaid, those on Medicare. We can get that easily for them.”
