Increasing Centralized Capacity for Prescription Renewal Requests

CHALLENGE

The team at Martin’s Point Health Care decided to pilot a modified centralized workflow for prescription renewal requests at two of its seven clinics. Rather than a centrally located team supporting several clinics, it leveraged one to two dedicated staff at each of the participating clinics. This allowed providers’ support staff, who were previously completing renewals, to focus their time on more value-added tasks like visit preparation and patient outreach. The pilot, which supported 27 providers, was met with much appreciation from both providers and clinical staff. Martin’s Point wished to expand this workflow to its other clinics, but it did not have the capacity to do so without hiring considerably more staff.

SOLUTION

Martin’s Point公司利用了Health Ca世界杯葡萄牙vs加纳即时走地talyst Embedded Refills应用程序，通过直接集成卫生系统的EMR和现有工作流程，并利用循证药物协议，专门实现安全、高效的处方续期请求委托。除了其他好处外，该应用程序显著减少了审查每个请求所需的时间。这正是Martin’s Point进一步支持其新工作流程和规模所需要的。

Initially, the team at Martin’s Point went live with Embedded Refills for 27 providers participating in the pilot. It quickly saw efficiency gains and a few months later it expanded to an additional 60 providers. Today, approximately 14,000 prescription renewal requests are completed each month by 7-10 dedicated renewal staff across its seven clinic locations—down from what was previously 80 clinical staff working renewals.

RESULTS

Embedded Refills has enabled the renewal staff at Martin’s Point to be much more efficient in the processing of prescription renewal requests, and as such, support more providers. Additionally, patients now benefit from receiving medications in a more timely manner and providers and staff have more time to focus on top of license work. Specifically, it has seen significant improvements in processing time, a reduction in duplicate requests and enhanced patient safety.

Prior to utilizing Embedded Refills, Kimberly Fallona, Sr. Project Manager at Martin’s Point, estimates each renewal request was taking approximately five minutes to complete. After implementing the application, that time dropped to just a minute and a half. “Based on our before and after processing times, we estimate having saved over 3,300 staff hours in just the first half of the year,” says Fallona.

Duplicate renewal requests were also a common occurrence. Often, duplicates are a result of slow turnaround times, as pharmacy systems automatically resend requests when they haven’t received a response in 24-48 hours. Since staff at Martin’s Point is now able to complete renewals faster, the turnaround time has decreased, leading to fewer duplicates.

Prior to utilizing Embedded Refills, duplicates for the original pilot providers accounted for roughly 10 percent of all renewals. After implementing the application and decreasing turnaround time, that rate dropped to 6.5 percent. Remaining duplicates are automatically flagged as such so that staff can simply ignore them and focus solely on the original prescription request. This combination of reduced duplicate rate and elimination of potential time spent on duplicates equates to approximately 47 hours of staff time saved each month.

也许实现嵌入式再灌注的最大好处之一是对患者安全的影响。由于应用程序将每个续订请求与患者的活跃药物列表交叉引用，因此它还可以指出潜在的药物错误。例如，在过去的8个月里，Martin 's Point收到了超过1万份药物申请，这些药物要么已经停产，要么已经改变了剂量。Fallona指出:“在医疗保健的所有阶段，患者的安全和信任都是至关重要的。嵌入式续药确保我们的质量和对患者的承诺得到满足，即使他们做的事情像要求处方续药这样简单。”