Enhanced integration supports efficiency, patient safety and regulatory compliance for hospice and palliative care medication management
PHILADELPHIA, September 21, 2021 – Enclara Pharmacia, the market leader in comprehensive pharmacy management services for the hospice community, announces the development of two-way medication interfacing with Complia Health’s Suncoast hospice EMR platform. This innovation supports efficiency, accuracy, and regulatory compliance by transmitting medications profiled by Enclara pharmacists directly to the hospice’s patient record in Suncoast.
“This is a huge step forward when it comes to establishing seamless interoperability, which is crucial to our core strategy of making life easier for hospice nurses, improving patient safety and ensuring timely access to symptom management,” said Scott Quilty, Chief Commercial Officer at Enclara. “With many hospices facing staffing challenges, we want to act on every opportunity to improve nurse productivity and user satisfaction.”
With a standard one-way medication interface, a hospice nurse profiles new medications for a patient via the hospice’s electronic medical record (EMR) system. That information flows directly to Enclara so medications can be dispensed, either by Enclara’s mail order service or a local pharmacy. While this is the preferred workflow, hospices with an EMR interface still end up profiling about 10% of medications directly through Enclara. With two-way interfacing, the EMR remains an accurate “single source of truth” regardless of where the medication records originate.
“Any time we have an opportunity to increase efficiency, reduce clinician burden and enhance patient safety we absolutely see the value to do so” said Paul Minton, SVP Product Management at Complia Health. “When we discussed this opportunity with Enclara they immediately recognized the value of building a real-time bi-directional flow of information. I am excited that Enclara and Complia Health are leading the way in this important capability to further strengthen the closed loop medication process.”
There are several reasons why a hospice nurse may end up profiling new medications directly through Enclara rather than through the EMR. These include time constraints in emergent situations and when medications are profiled during real time consultation with an Enclara pharmacist. These pharmacists are often called upon to advise on symptom management. They also reach out when they see an issue with a newly profiled medication such as a potential drug interaction or allergy concern.
By ensuring consistent medication entries on Enclara and Suncoast patient records, this enhanced integration also simplifies regulatory compliance under Medicare’s Hospice Change Request (CR) 8358 requirements. Enclara transmits medication utilization information to most of the over a dozen leading hospice EMRs with which it maintains integrations. Other hospice pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) do as well and may even refer to that service as “bidirectional”. However, because a PBM pharmacist and hospice nurse may enter medications slightly differently, there remains some need for manual reconciliation. With the real-time two-way flow of information between Enclara and Suncoast, this time-consuming process can be reduced or eliminated.
The new Enclara and Suncoast interface is currently in a pilot phase. It will be offered to other current clients in fall of 2021 and will then be made available to all Enclara clients transitioning to Suncoast or Suncoast clients transitioning to Enclara moving forward.
About Enclara Pharmacia
Enclara Pharmacia is a national full-service PBM and mail order supplier of medications and clinical services developed specifically for the hospice and palliative care industry. Enclara serves over 400 hospice providers and 97,000 patients nationally, helping to reduce pharmacy costs through a clinically driven model that enables home delivery of pharmaceuticals as well as access to a network of over 65,000 local pharmacies, including an actively managed network subset of over 7,000 retail pharmacies, institutional pharmacies, and Enclara’s own automated fulfillment solutions. To learn more visit www.enclarapharmacia.com
About Complia Health
Complia Health is a leading provider of technology and expertise for the post-acute and long-term care markets to create efficiencies and simplify processes for agencies across the US. Thousands of home care, home health, hospice, palliative care, residential care, bereavement, and community care agencies count on Complia Health for the clinical, operational, and financial solutions required to profitability deliver quality care to their clients. Complia Health’s innovative products are supported by an industry-leading team of health and technology experts located in the United States. To learn more, visit https://www.compliahealth.com.
Contacts:
Anthony Dameika
Enclara Marketing & Communications
267.514.6564
[email protected]
Hellen Budaya Pileski
Complia Health Marketing & Communications
[email protected]
