Last year, an independent North Carolina pharmacy chain sought to take on the problem of prescription abandonment by adding a new workflow process to pharmacy operations. The pharmacy then launched a 60-day study to what, if any, impact the revised workflow would have on patient behavior. The result? Almost 80 percent of patients involved obtained their medications.
As reported by the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association, the workflow process included a conversation flowchart and will-call bag tag. Pharmacists used the workflow process to reach out to patients to understand why they were not picking up their medications. Through these interactions, pharmacy staff was able to identify top reasons for prescription abandonment, and work to resolve those obstacles. This included enrolling patients in a medication synchronization program and sending out pickup reminders.
Overall, the pharmacy’s test was considered a success, with the study’s authors noting the value of the workflow process in helping to curtail prescription abandonment and address medication adherence.
This illustrates just one of the many ways in which workflow customization is helping pharmacies add efficiency to their operations. As pharmacies play an increasingly important role in community health care, it’s essential to have flexibility in responding to patient and pharmacy needs.
PrimeRx™ users have that flexibility. The pharmacy management system offers significant workflow customization capabilities that can be easily configured, usually with a few simple clicks and setting adjustments. Current PrimeRx™ workflow customization capabilities include:
- Prescription Accuracy: Ensure all prescription information is accurate and validated, and all prescriptions seamlessly stored.
- Queue management: Establish rules that assign different priority levels. For example, patients waiting in-store may be flagged fr “priority” processing. in addition, PrimeRx™ can be configured to restrict prescriptions added to the exceptions queue from advancing to the next workflow.
- Automated Refill Management: Medication refills are automatically initiated on a recurring basis. This provides a convenience to patients and helps address medication non-adherence by simplifying the refill process.
- Claims Pre-check: Ensure accuracy of all claims before they are submitted to a third party.
- Patient communication: Easily pre-program outbound messages and texts for delivery to patients. Communications can include personalized medication pick-up reminders, as well as group “blasts” with information about immunization clinics, bloodmobiles, or other messages with broad appeal.
- Batch management: Automatically record prescriptions that are part of a batch.
- Will Call Management: Enable pharmacy staff members to identify a prescription’s precise location at any point in the process.
- Workflow Sequence Flexibility: PrimeRx3 allows flexibility in identifying workflow pathways. While most systems establish “intake queue” and “exception queue” as default queues, PrimeRx™ allows the user to establish a customized queue sequence, based on a specific need.
- Specialty pharmacy recommendations: Establish customized rules to accommodate specialty prescriptions, which can operate in tandem with the pharmacy’s “regular” prescription workflows.
Workflow customization can come in many forms, and affect different aspects of pharmacy management. As the above discussion makes clear, PrimeRx™ prioritizes customization, and can quite easily accommodate a pharmacy’s specific needs. If you are interested in pursuing greater workflow efficiency within your pharmacy, PrimeRx™ can help. To learn more, please contact Micro Merchant Solutions to speak with a technician, or to set up a PrimeRx™ demo.
