What is gold bagging?
It stands to reason that something labeled “gold” meets a pretty high standard. Gold bagging, a new approach to delivering prescription drugs to patients, is the new hot topic in pharmacy right now.
Maybe it would be easiest to understand in terms of the three other more commonly used types of Rx delivery:
- Clear Bagging occurs when a health system’s specialty pharmacy delivers medication directly to clinicians who administer it to a patient
- White Bagging occurs when a pharmacy outside the health system ships medication directly to the hospital, clinic or provider’s office
- Brown Bagging occurs when the patient gets their own medications from their local pharmacy, later bringing the drugs to their doctor’s office or clinic to have them administered onsite
Each approach is effective, but clear bagging offers the greatest level of control since it’s managed within the health system. However, gold bagging will soon overtake clear bagging as it ensures ownership/administration by health system’s internal specialty pharmacy staff.
More specifically, Gold Bagging takes clear bagging to a new gold standard of care. Let’s break it down:
- By improving the process and handling the entire chain of custody in-house, it ensures every patient gets the right drug in the right place at the right time
- By ensuring all medications are prescribed by the health system’s own pharmacy and tracking those prescriptions all the way to point of patient care, the specialty pharmacist can reduce the risk of error and better manage costs
- By reducing patients’ stress about whether or not their Rx will arrive on time, it improves patient outcomes
What can your pharmacy do to make it happen?
If your specialty pharmacy is ready to make the leap to gold bagging, VPL TrajectRx is a great place to start. Built for pharmacists by pharmacists, it empowers pharmacies by giving them a cloud-based shipping solution to build smarter operations. We make it easy to ship prescriptions, track them to their destinations, and communicate shipping updates to patients and staff.
Schedule a live demo with us to see the platform in action, and we’ll answer any questions you may have.
