Challenge
A non-profit health system with 30 hospitals set a goal to increase and expand their patient discharge data to help them better serve their communities and improve the health of their patients. To do this, the health system established a holistic initiative to increase the number of its patients using other services post-acute stay. They wanted to ensure patient access to services such as hospice, rehabilitation, imaging, providers, and pharmacy, to name a few. This would allow them to better care for patients by keeping them within their care continuum to best track their wellness.
For the pharmacy department, they needed to discover how they could increase their utilization rates to better track their success as a department and, therefore, better track the overall health of the patients they serve.
Solution
To increase pharmacy utilization and capture the discharge data they were seeking, the pharmacy, in conjunction with their compliance and other related teams, created a workflow. During any patient encounter, patients were presented with an agreement upon admission to opt in to using the Arizona health system’s pharmacy.* This would give patients peace of mind and confidence that before they left the hospital, they would have their prescriptions. No need to go out of their way to make an extra stop on the way home or wait in a long line at their local pharmacy chain.
During any patient encounter, patients were presented with an agreement upon admission to opt in to using the health system’s pharmacy.
This approach immediately increased their patient utilization rates but also decreased readmission rates significantly among patients that received their prescription from their health system vs. patients that received it from somewhere else. How did they do all of this with such massive success? We’re proud to say that Emporos played a role in streamlining this client’s process by making their approach safe and simple.
*Patients were also given the ability to opt out of the pharmacy at any time.
Results
Increased the number of medications received before discharge
By leveraging the power of the Emporos Point of Sale solution, the client was able to measure how many patients were leaving with their medication upon discharge in the Emporos platform. This led to a significant increase in patients leaving the hospital with their medications upon discharge, which in turn led to a healthier patient population.
Decreased readmission rates
The health system was able to prove via the Emporos reporting module that patients receiving prescriptions from their hospital were readmitted much less frequently vs. patients that utilized other pharmacies.
Emporos Point of Sale helped increase fill rates by 86% in less than one year!
Collected payment at discharge for increased profitability
An increase in payment collection has also been a big benefit of Emporos for the non-profit. They’ve been able to reduce how often they send bills via the mail with hopes of receiving those payments in days, weeks, or months. Now they can capture payment before the patient leaves the clinic!
Patient safety
Emporos offers a plethora of safety features, such as date of birth verification and will call patient verification, which helped this client decrease the number of errors at the point of sale, ensuring that the right patients are getting the right medications at the right time.
Ease of use
Emporos makes it easy to streamline operations and increase productivity by providing a point of sale (POS) that eliminates the guesswork for pharmacy staff.
Reliability
Prior to using Emporos, this customer’s pharmacy was leveraging a point of sale (POS) that went offline frequently, causing disruption and inhibiting the ability to conduct pharmacy transactions. They noted a significant impact with Emporos, saying we are “extremely reliable.”
Conclusion
There are many benefits of leveraging the power of Emporos and our robust Point of Sale (POS) solution. In the case of this customer, we are thrilled to see them make such a huge, positive impact for patients in their communities to help them live happier, healthier lives.
