As more and more patients need care delivered in the home-based setting, home infusion pharmacy has become one of the hottest new care trends. And for good reason. Quality of care and patient quality of life go up and readmission rates go down when patients are in the home with their pharmacist, nurses and other caregivers overseeing the care plan. With these kinds of outcomes, we shouldn’t be surprised that the payer market is also behind home infusion care.

So where does that leave providers trying to navigate this $19 billion-dollar industry serving 3.3 million patients? (Source: National Home Infusion Association). Your pharmacists need precision, accuracy and timeliness as they fill prescriptions and build compounds for patients whose lives depend on it. They also need patient data at their fingertips including current medications, allergies, prior history and lab results. Your billers need instant access to prices, rates, insurance policies, regulatory compliance and claims adjudication. And your executive leadership needs data analytics and reporting to make the best decision for the business.

In other words, everybody needs fast information at their fingertips, and that’s where software providers come in. Automation, pharmacist ease and continuous innovation are three key factors that can help you get your home infusion pharmacy where it needs to be.

1. Insist on intelligent automation. Pricing, dosage, number of doses, all that calculation should be done by your software and presented to the pharmacist to review and approve. Think about it: your pharmacist is building a sterile compound and instead of having to keep filling in all the ingredients like 0.5 milliliters of sodium chloride and so on, it’s all automatically calculated. Likewise, claims adjudication, prior authorization and financial calculations should be handled by the software. There’s no manual intervention needed because there’s an automated process in place that connects to payers.
2. Elevate the experience of your pharmacists. Make sure you find a software provider who is constantly prioritizing listening to customers to learn what they want for their own success. At Brightree, we’ve listened to our home infusion pharmacists, and they want less clicks, data at their fingertips and an intuitive workflow to guide them for better efficiency and outcomes. So, guess what? That’s what we’ve delivered – a solution that makes it easier for pharmacists and techs to take care of patients. (link to CarePro case study)
3. Hit the gas pedal on innovation. Find a technology partner that is constantly innovating and thinking about how to automate processes and provide maximum intelligence that can be baked into the software. Over the summer, we released a new feature called Managed Lots that replaced a manual process where pharmacists had to manually click to pick ingredients from different lots. Now that this is a fully automated process, pharmacists report that they can’t imagine how they operated without it. This is a perfect example of why we devote a large percentage of our annual spend at Brightree on innovation.

We all know that the home infusion pharmacy is a critical care setting with no room for error. To pave the way for the greatest outcomes for your patients and your business, make sure your software solution is all in on intelligent automation, pharmacist ease and endless innovation.

Want to learn more about how you can improve the success of your home infusion pharmacy? Read how CarePro improved the speed, ease and care of their pharmacy business.