Why Providers Need to Work With Digital Pharmacies

Digital pharmacies are on the rise. The concept of e-prescription is gaining popularity due to its simplistic nature. There are not only advantages for the patients, but advantages of digital pharmacies for providers are also not a hidden truth.

E-prescribing is a newer way of collaboration between the doctors and the pharmacies. This digital fulfillment and provision of prescription medicine cuts the cost of operation for the doctors and makes the whole process of prescription, fulfillment, and adherence much more transparent than physical prescription. Digital pharmacy for doctors gives a chance to maintain the workflow of a clinic in a much more organized way than before. Here are some advantages of digital pharmacies for providers to get a better idea why they should collaborate with these new settlements:

Advantages of Digital Pharmacies for Providers:

Digital pharmacies are helping doctors in many ways. They are contributing to ease the work of doctors and they significantly cut the costs of pharmaceutical operations in a clinic. Let’s see what more digital pharmacies do for a doctor:

Improved Patient Safety:

Through e-prescribing, your doctor directly sends the prescription to a digital pharmacy using a system of software’s. This process ensures the safety of the patient’s information. There are no external influences involved between the doctor and the pharmacist in this case, hence there’s no breach of information.

There is no risk of losing a prescription, theft or forgery in an electronic prescription as compared to a handwritten prescription.

With direct contact between the healthcare provider and the pharmacy, many risks such as selection of drugs other than prescribed, overdose, omission of drug information due to the inability of the pharmacist to understand the written prescription, and repeat therapy get minimized. The process becomes opaque between the doctor and the digital pharmacy, hence there are no safety threats to the patients.

Clinical Support for Providers:

Through an electronic prescribing system that works with the help of a digital pharmacy, doctors can see the full record of a patient. Digital pharmacy for doctor provides all the necessary information about allergies, interactions of drugs, and a patient’s history of diseases.

The system sends an alert to the provider whenever there is a chance of prescribing a wrong medicine (a medicine that can harm a patient).

The biggest advantage this system thus provides to the doctors is to cut their time of going through records each time. They can carry out checkups of more patients by doing a collaboration with a digital pharmacy.

Enhanced Patient Medication Adherence:

With a system that keeps tabs on a patient’s health, the digital pharmacy business ensures that the patient doesn’t miss a dose. The doctors can keep a check on if the patients have procured the medicines or not.

In case of a hand-written prescription, the healthcare provider never knows if the patient bought the medicines or not, if the prescription fulfillment process got completed or not, if the patient went again in case the medicine ended.

A digital setup, however, ensures all these checkpoints to be effectively met. These systems give better after care to the discharged patients through regular follow-up after they leave the hospital.

Increased Operational Efficiency:

With a collaboration of a doctor and digital pharmacy, the patients do not need to wait for getting their prescriptions approved after the pharmacy hours. The overall time of processing a prescription reduces significantly with software’s handling the electronic health record of patients.

Imagine going to a pharmacist who picks every medicine by looking into the prescription and checking the availability of each drug. Will it not take much more time than an automated system that not only reads the prescription, but also fetches data for availability in a matter of seconds. Thus, such a system will benefit everyone in hours when there is a shortage of workforce.

Reduced Operating Costs:

Providing the patients with 24/7 pharmaceutical support that involves human force can be expensive. The hospitals have to invest huge amounts to provide around the clock service to its patients.

A digital pharmacy on the other hand can provide remote consultations about the medicinal dosage and usage. The hospital pharmacy doesn’t have to be on the toes for every incoming patient if they decide to collaborate with a digital pharmacy. This way, a hospital can see more patients, increasing the revenue and decreasing the cost. This will reduce the operational costs significantly for the hospitals and the healthcare providers.

Takeaway:

Besides improved patient safety, clinical support for providers, enhanced patient medicine adherence, Increased operational efficiency and reduced operating costs, a digital pharmacy gives a chance to the doctors to have their patients’ data secured.

The efficient management of patient data thus makes it easy to take insurance companies onboard. The doctors can do their work in peace due to less time invested in rechecking handwritten prescriptions manually.

This leaves the doctors with much more time to invest in patient care and patient retention. Besides these points, a digital pharmacy collaboration ensures less number of ADEs. The ADEs are adverse drug reactions that can be neglected due to unavailability of patient information with a handwritten prescription. Not only do the doctors benefit from the system, but all the other employees work more efficiently when there’s a seamless pharmaceutical system in place.