Benefits of Telepharmacy: Free Your Pharmacists!

Pharmacists are highly trained and highly compensated, yet many hospital pharmacists spend their days in front of the computer reviewing and verifying medication orders. Most hospital pharmacists chose to work in the hospital setting rather than a retail setting in order to apply their clinical knowledge. In reality, many are often overwhelmed with the number of orders they have to review and aren’t left with time to do other things. It doesn’t have to be this way – telepharmacy provides the infrastructure and efficiency you need to free your pharmacists.

Free Your Pharmacists

One of the many benefits of telepharmacy is that it provides your pharmacists with the opportunity to do more than review orders all day. Of course, for some pharmacists this may be a scary concept at first – but research shows that the more pharmacists are involved with direct care, the more patient health and satisfaction improves. Plus, this also gives pharmacists a chance to participate in clinical programs. The best part? This all occurs while improving productivity, improving morale, and reducing costs.

Get your pharmacists out from the basement and interacting with patients by utilizing telepharmacy.

Improve Patient Care

According to the National Governor’s Association, pharmacists participating in multi-disciplinary teams have the opportunity for more intense and direct care of patients. This participation has been shown to decrease preventable adverse drug events (PADEs), decrease prescribing errors, and reduce pharmacy operating costs.

When pharmacists are involved with multi-disciplinary teams, organizations decrease PADEs, decrease prescribing errors and reduce pharmacy operating costs.

Increase Clinical Program Participation

With less time spent reviewing and verifying orders, pharmacists can support essential clinical programs and initiatives such as:

• Medication reconciliation
• Antimicrobial stewardship
• Opioid oversight
• Chronic disease management
• Discharge counseling

Better clinical programs in turn help hospitals obtain top-tier physicians, get early access to advanced technologies, improve their rankings and of course improve quality outcomes. Whether your pharmacists want to begin a new clinical program or more actively participate in existing programs, implementing telepharmacy can make it possible for them to achieve those goals.

Utilizing telepharmacy frees up your pharmacists to participate in more clinical programs and initiatives.

Why Telepharmacy?

Hospitals could just hire more full-time pharmacists to get this done, but optimizing existing pharmacy resources using telepharmacy technology is a much more cost-effective choice and allows organizations to get more from their existing staff by increasing utilization and efficiency by up to 25-30%. The time saved can then be invested in clinical programs.

By optimizing existing staff utilizing telepharmacy, health care organizations can improve pharmacy operations across the board. The results are increased pharmacy coverage, reduced turnaround times, and more meaningful interventions. Additionally, telepharmacy can increase pharmacist job satisfaction, nursing satisfaction, and patient satisfaction. That’s a win.

Rome Memorial Hospital: Using Telepharmacy in the Real World

Scott Burns, Director of Pharmacy at Rome Memorial Hospital in New York, turned to telepharmacy in an effort to make lasting changes to hospital operations. Having begun his career as a pharmacist in a small town, he grew to enjoy interacting with patients and having a direct impact on their lives. His idea behind making operational changes at Rome Memorial was, “the more you simplify the process, the more time you’ll have to spend with patients.”

Scott Burns of Rome Memorial hoped to make operational changes to with the idea that “the more you simplify the process, the more time you’ll have to spend with patients.”

Back in 2011, Rome Memorial was implementing an electronic medical record (EMR) system which exposed a gap in pharmacy coverage. After looking into their options, Scott determined that hiring more staff was not a cost-effective solution and instead turned to telepharmacy. Scott found PipelineRx who was able to help extend their team and leverage technology to ease existing workflows.

Improving efficiency was just the tip of the iceberg for Rome Memorial. Telepharmacy provided the pharmacy team with immediate and long term improvements like:

• Strengthening pharmacy-nursing collaboration: This ultimately resulted in safer and better comprehensive care for patients.
• Expanding clinical programs: Telepharmacy gave Rome Memorial the opportunity to continue expanding clinical programs including improvements to antimicrobial stewardship, documentation, and prescribing.

Improve Your Pharmacy Operations with Telepharmacy from PipelineRx

PipelineRx offers a range of proven solutions to help you cost-effectively improve pharmacy operations. These solutions were developed not just to supplement your pharmacy but to rethink it so you can achieve more of your strategic goals.

Designed by pharmacists for pharmacists, our cloud-based telepharmacy software platform provides the flexibility you need in any combination:

• Insource Telepharmacy Service: PipelineRx allows multi-site facilities to optimize your own pharmacy staff and re-engineer your medication order workflow throughout your health system for improved operations.
• Outsource Telepharmacy Services: This service provides 24/7 access to experienced clinical pharmacists making it easy for you to extend hours at a rate that is 20-75% lower than compared to in-house staffing.
• Clinical Services: Easily meet CMS and other mandates in addition to your organization’s own clinical and financial objectives. Our clinical service offerings include medication reconciliation, an antimicrobial stewardship program (ASP), and transitions of care.

Our telepharmacy services can help you streamline pharmacy workflows and increase efficiency.

By using our services and software, organizations can quickly leverage the power of telepharmacy to improve operations throughout your healthcare organization. Our solution is highly scalable with more than 15 million medication orders verified using our system every year and over 800 pharmacists using our system every day.

Ready to improve your pharmacy operations? Contact us today to learn more about our services and software.