When you go to the specialty pharmacy’s web page, it is pretty clear that the site is not meant for patients. The specialty pharmacy is very proud of its excellence in supply chain management. You will see hardly any mention of their clinical skills and biomedical knowledge on their site, but there is an awful lot of content about how good they are at delivering drugs—especially weird drugs—to where they need to go in a timely manner. They can optimize end-to-end efficiencies and provide inventory management solutions for all of your weird drug supply chain management needs.

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, the drug company is making me get my medication from this specialty pharmacy instead of mailing me a magical coupon that I could redeem at a normal pharmacy. Well, that is not true; I have a pretty good guess about their motivation. Money. There’s probably enough mark-up between the drug company, the distributer, and the retail pharmacy that it seems like a good idea to the drug company to have the medicine FedExed to me overnight by the world’s leading experts in pharmaceutical supply chain management.

They’ve had my prescription for seven calendar days. Sure, many of them are not business days, but I feel like specialty pharmaceutical distribution shouldn’t just be a Monday - Friday thing. Retail pharmacies are open on evenings and weekends. Patients probably need weird drugs at all sorts of weird times. I have been told that I am unlikely to hear from them for probably another week, give or take. But once I hear from them, it should only be another day or two, give or take, before they FedEx me my medicine.

If I asked you to guess the ten most successful companies in the Fortune 500 (measured in terms of revenue), most people I know would be able to come up with more than half of them with a reasonable number of guesses. The specialty pharmacy is currently in sixth place (fifth place last year), and I had never ever heard of this company before last week. They bring in more revenue than Amazon.com. Almost as much revenue as Apple.

(Aside: I will now name-drop this company in future arguments about how we pay for healthcare in the United States.)

Why is it taking them so long to process my prescription and send me my medication? Because they were off by a factor of five in predicting demand for this drug. The rep on the phone told me that they expected to be delivering the medication to roughly 200 patients per day, but they are currently looking at a volume of over a thousand patients per day. If anyone should know about drug demand forecasting, it should be this company.

This makes me feel a little bit better about my early attempts at predicting the future being really quite terrible.

My first runs were entirely awful because some default setting in the software really wanted to force a particular type of model that is obviously wrong, wrong, wrong for what I was doing. After I overrode that feature, the predictions were still wrong, but less so. As they were consistently wrong, though, I think that I know what I need to try next. Unfortunately, my next step is going to be hard to learn about because its name shares almost all of its characters with something trendy in machine learning, and Google is all clogged up with ML. And what I need are some old-timey statistics. When I get back in the office next week, we’ll see what sort of code is out there to help me minimize some sums of squares.