Melissa Kozak
Jun 14 2022
Reading Time: 3 minutes
By: Melissa Kozak, RN, BSN, President & Co-Founder, CitusHealth
As the pandemic slows and the nationwide staffing shortage continues, care teams and resources in specialty pharmacy are stretched thin. Phone waits are long, and patients are concerned about refills and shortages of critical medications. Because of these challenges, contactless delivery has become an ongoing expectation—which is why it’s crucial to provide remote care support for patients, families, and caregivers.
To provide a higher level of virtual patient and caregiver engagement, as well as foster more efficient care team collaboration, pharmacies must provide staff with the tools they need to operate in these changing times—while optimizing those tools to get the most out of their investment.
How can your pharmacy provide a high level of remote patient support? Here’s a checklist of eight critical services you should offer:
- Provide two-way patient and caregiver communication.
- Patients and caregivers are concerned about medication refills and timely delivery of their critical meds. Digital patient and caregiver communication are more important than ever, which is why they need the ability to engage with pharmacy staff in real time.
- Make refill forms customizable.
- Traditional phone-based communication can delay therapy and lower rates for medication adherence. Automating manual processes with customizable mobile forms that allow for conditional logic helps ensure patients receive timely delivery of medications, improves outcomes, and enhances data collection.
- Offer secure, instant care team messaging.
- With care teams primarily operating remotely, waiting for an email or return phone call loses valuable time. Securely communicating in a virtual environment allows the pharmacist, staff, delivery personnel, or other care team member to exchange messages promptly.
- Capture signatures electronically.
- With the increasing need for contactless interactions, electronic or app-less signatures for critical documentation helps ensure timely delivery, confident claim support, faster processing, and more streamlined integration into your pharmacy dispensing system.
- Have the ability to broadcast messages.
- Quickly broadcasting important information concerning critical updates to the entire census and their caregivers saves valuable time. Whether COVID-19 information or a natural disaster, the ability to instantly communicate to a mobile device is critical.
- Provide access to educational materials.
- Since patients, families, and caregivers have greater responsibility for care in a remote setting, making it possible to easily access customized educational materials at any time, any place, on any device helps them support the care plan and helps ensure therapy adherence.
- Prioritize multi-lingual support.
- Patients and their families may be more comfortable communicating in their native language. Auto-translate features can reduce delays in care when receiving inbound communications.
- Support pharmacy dispensing system integration.
- Integration into a provider’s pharmacy dispensing system helps ensure that the digital patient information captured in texts, forms, and electronic signatures is presented at critical points in the workflow and the patient record. CitusHealth supports FHIR-based APIs, which are promoted by CMS and essential to integration.
Everything on this list can help you provide a high level of remote patient support, and it can also provide maximum return on investment for specialty pharmacies. It can help to enable better adherence, greater efficiencies, and happier patients, families, and caregivers—and only CitusHealth offers this kind of integration.
Remote patient support can have a significant impact on satisfaction, which is why pharmacies need the right digital tools that can help them achieve it. Schedule a demo to see for yourself how CitusHealth can help specialty pharmacies increase support for patients and collaboration for care teams.
