Joe and Nancy, an elderly couple who share the same chronic illness diagnosis, recently went in for check-up appointments and spoke to a Pharmacy Liaison while they were there. Joe and Nancy shared with the Liaison the trouble they had trying to manage all of their medications.

Nancy said that their current pharmacy was very pushy when it came to refilling her medications and was pressured to refill them right away, so she ended up having to take multiple trips to the pharmacy just to pick up all of their refills. The Liaison saw the frustration building in Nancy and told the couple that the hospital specialty pharmacy program could eventually get all of their medications on the same schedule. In addition, she said the hospital pharmacy could get all of their medications delivered directly to their doorstep. She told the couple that Pharmacy Liaisons work directly with the patient’s doctor to coordinate their treatment and can save them many trips back and forth to the pharmacy.

Joe and Nancy were thrilled to hear this and couldn’t believe they didn’t switch to this service sooner. Nancy has now spoken to her Liaison several times over the past week to get her medication back on track and expressed how grateful she is for this service. She really enjoys being able to call and talk directly to a person she trusts who will care for her, instead of being greeted by a machine on the other end of the phone line. With fewer trips to the pharmacy, Nancy now spends her days in her garden and getting back to the activities she loves.

Key Takeaways:

• Integrated Care: 3-5x more patient care interactions leads to higher patient satisfaction rates and fewer lapses in care.
• Reducing re-admission rates: Proactive patient refill calls by trained Pharmacy Liaisons has proven to reduce re-admission rates among high risk patient populations.
• Improved Time to Therapy: Implementing a specialty pharmacy program in partnership with Shields Health Solutions can shorten a patient’s time to therapy from 21 days (industry average) to 3 days.

To learn more about the difficulties that a specialty pharmacy patient faces and how implementing your own in-house specialty pharmacy program can provide better, more integrated care to these patients, check out this video: https://bit.ly/2UEtoQM