Home is where the healthcare is
Care is moving to new venues, and Hospital-at-Home (HaH) impacts specialty pharmacy significantly. According to a recent article in Pharmacy Times, over the next three years, nearly $265 billion in services for Medicare fee-for-service and Medicare Advantage patients could shift from healthcare facilities to the home.¹
Perhaps no part of the hospital will be more engaged in this shift to HaH than the specialty pharmacy. “Hospital at home: Development of pharmacy services,” a recent posting in the American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy™ stated that “randomized controlled trials demonstrated that HaH produces favorable outcomes, lowers overall medical costs, and decreases excess healthcare utilization, including 30-day readmissions. Patients in HaH programs describe better continuity of care and increased satisfaction, and frail older adults experience less sedentary time and better functional outcomes.”²
But to ensure such positive outcomes, it is critical to ensure medication management is successfully implemented.
Since most prescription workflows are not built with clinicians in mind, specialty pharmacists often face substantial distribution issues when getting critical meds to HaH patients. In fact, a recent URAC study reported that specialty pharmacies have more than two times as many errors in the distribution of a prescription as they do in the dispensing of it, largely due to complex shipping issues.³
In addition, manual data entry, lack of visibility, and poor temperature control can all cause serious safety concerns.
How specialty pharmacies can support the shift to hospital-at-home care
As Hospital-at-Home impacts specialty pharmacy and more of them make the transition, they should be looking for a clinically minded, software-based shipping solution optimized for the healthcare industry—one like VPL. Here are just a few of the features our pharmacy solution offers and specialty pharmacies should insist upon:
- Software that integrates with the existing workflow
- Mitigation of human error
- Visibility, including downstream proof of delivery
- Reduced need for package rescue
- Automated updates of product status to patients
- On-demand analytics
- A customizable list of carriers and couriers
Specialty pharmacists will be key to making Hospital-at-Home programs the best they can be. And with the right software, they can do just that.
Request a quote for our Rx shipping, tracking, and compliance platform for specialty pharmacies.
