Starting small to build tech-enabled population health solutions
Telemedicine, artificial intelligence and precision medicine
are all being deployed by healthcare providers to enhance population health management.
But the pace at which more urban hospitals and health systems are able to invest in such tools offers yet another sign of the gulf between them and rural providers, who often don’t have the resources for such investments.
“The language has been, ‘They’ve never had the kind of money that most larger systems do, so they’ve had to think creatively,’ ” said Patrick Pilch, national leader at consulting firm BDO’s Center for Healthcare Excellence & Innovation.
That’s led some to start small and focus first on initiatives inside the hospital with the hope of one day branching out into more communitywide endeavors.
At Carolina Pines Regional Medical Center in Hartsville, S.C., trying to keep up with the influx of medication prescription orders for inpatients coming in overnight was a constant challenge.
The 116-bed acute-care facility couldn’t afford or recruit a night-time pharmacy staff to verify the after-hours prescription orders. So when pharmacy workers arrived at work in the morning, they would often have a backlog of up to 70 prescription orders, which led to long delays in patients receiving their medications.
“It took a couple of hours to catch up before we could get into our normal
workflow,” said Dr. Paul Alford, director of pharmacy services at Carolina Pines, which is located 75 miles from Charlotte.
So in 2015, Carolina Pines contracted with PipelineRx, a telepharmacy service provider headquartered in San Francisco, to operate its verification of overnight pharmacy orders. Since then the hospital has expanded its telepharmacy services to include pharmacokinetic and renal dosing, and initiated the hospital’s antimicrobial stewardship guidelines.
Alford said telecommunication has helped reduce how long it takes to process prescription orders, helping bridge what was once a sizable gap in Carolina Pines’ ability to improve care quality and patient safety. He estimated that using the telepharmacy services lets the hospital spend less than half of what it would cost to staff the pharmacy 24 hours a day.
“I think this is the wave of the future,” Alford said. “This is going to give access to a level of patient care in terms of safety that rural facilities typically wouldn’t have access to otherwise.”