Overcoming 5 Common Pharmacy Patient Intake Bottlenecks

Patient intake is the most time-critical activity impacting the success of your pharmacy home infusion business, and too often the onboarding process can be complicated and labor-intensive for both your staff and patients. When workflows become jammed due to error or slow manual tasks, you risk endless intake bottlenecks that can have a negative trickle-down effect on both your business operations and patient outcomes.

Let’s look at 5 common patient intake challenges and the solutions that will keep your pharmacy team on track towards success. We’ll go over strategies to:

Streamline incoming referrals
Accurately qualify home infusion referrals
Monitor referral progress
Communicate with referral sources and patients
Ensure adequate staffing

Streamline incoming referrals with automated documentation

How your pharmacy business manages incoming referrals sets the tone for your intake workflow. It can make or break your team’s ability to quickly and easily onboard new patients and send decisions to referral sources. If you’re using paper documentation, you may find it incredibly challenging to keep referrals organized. When some arrive by fax, some by phone, and still others by verbal orders, each channel requires a separate workflow that involves a time-consuming transfer of information. You need a comprehensive strategy to overcome hurdles such as:

Costly & inefficient paper filing, including future document retrieval to correct errors when they occur
Difficulty sharing information and identifying missing data
Chasing physical documentation and tracking down information from multiple sources

Luckily, there’s a simple way to alleviate the stress and cost of incoming referrals: go paperless with the right pharmacy EMR system. By eliminating the paper trail, you ensure that data is stored in easily accessible records, no matter the referral source. Most important is to choose a system that has eFax, eReferral, and ePrescribe capabilities, like this one from Brightree, making it easy for both your team and your referral sources to communicate information.

Quickly and accurately qualify pharmacy referrals

Patient intake often requires quick decisions and accurate knowledge of different payers and types of therapies. This can lead to stress, errors, or hesitation when members of your team are tasked with gathering information outside of their knowledge base and documenting it correctly. If any of the necessary background and treatment information is missing or inaccurate, you risk delays in treatment, denial of claims, or outstanding bills and lost payments.

Complicated or outdated referral qualification processes are often the culprit behind frequent errors or slow onboarding as your team works to accurately record detailed information. E-mails are lost, staff neglect to ask the right questions for specific therapies, and you’re left with inadequate information to proceed with treatment. Your best strategy for fast qualification and a better patient experience? Software solutions that guide the intake qualification process and improve communication between entities.

By integrating an automated, comprehensive patient intake software solution into your workflows, you have the opportunity to:

Expertly guide patients through the process
Coordinate staff roles and efficiently assign tasks to prevent mistakes
Ensure crucial informationfor specific therapies or payers isn’t ignored during intake

When choosing the right automated intake solution for your business, ask if workflows can be personalized to meet your needs and directly address your biggest roadblocks to qualification.

Monitor referrals’ progress with precision tools

While a referral is being processed, it can be easy to lose sight of the big picture. There’s a sense of urgency to send a decision to the referral source before they take their business to another provider, therefore your management team needs to stay on top of your staff’s progress. Bottlenecks can occur when internal workflows prevent high-level visibility and leave individual team members without a way to communicate a referral’s status effectively.

Interactive digital worklists are a great way to give yourself full oversight of the referral process within your team. These worklists allow you to easily view the due date, ownership, and status of referrals – all in one place. Spot missing documentation, empty fields, or delayed tasks to keep referrals on track and successfully enroll new patients in needed therapies.

Optimize electronic communication with referrals and patients

For paperless strategies to yield the best results, electronic communication needs to be a two-way street. You may integrate efficient software automations on your end, but you need to encourage both referral sources and patients to use digital documentation as well. Let’s look at a few ways you can engage partners and patients with easy-to-use tools that promote fast, accurate communication.

For referral sources:

Look for software that supports ePrescribe to automate patient and prescription entry, plus improve communication channels
Encourage using eRx prescriptions and accept home infusion prescriptions through networks like SureScripts

For patients:

Choose a patient portal that actively engages patients in the referral and treatment process
Communicate with patients early and often to increase efficiency and compliance. Automate notifications for deliveries or visits using a portal and other contact methods (phone, e-mail, texting, etc.)
Automatically assign patient portal inquiries to specific teams and ensure follow-up with digital worklists

Use data analytics to ensure adequate staffing

When it comes to preventing bottlenecks, analyzing referral data can help you avoid workflow jams by keeping the right amount of staff members on board. If referral numbers are trending upward, you can pre-emptively bring additional staff on board to keep things running smoothly. You should also pay attention to which types of referrals are growing or declining in numbers, since different therapies and payer types will require different levels of attention and time from your team.

Metrics should, of course, guide success in many aspects of your pharmacy home infusion business. By investing in an advanced analytics solution, you gain profitable insights into billing, dispenses, patients, and more. Stay ahead of the game by consistently monitoring data surrounding your referral process and improve your performance by making the right adjustments at the right time.

By taking these proactive steps to automate and digitize your pharmacy intake process, you’ll avoid perilous roadblocks to success and keep workflows running smoothly. For more information on pharmacy and intake management strategies, explore Brightree’s Pharmacy solutions or get in touch with specific home infusion software questions.

Request a demo today for a closer look at Brightree.

See what Brightree can do for you

Leah Blake

Leah is passionate about delivering best in class business management solutions to to HME and pharmacy customers in her role as VP of Product Management, ReSupply & Pharmacy. She collaborates with cross-functional teams to define and fulfill the product vision for Brightree’s pharmacy product. Leah has ten years of experience in software for the post-acute healthcare industry. Before becoming product manager, Leah served as a sales engineer at Brightree for four years gaining an advanced understanding of products and customers. Prior to that, she worked in various roles at Rock-Pond Solutions providing data analytics and reporting solutions to infusion and specialty pharmacy providers.