As a follow up to the groundbreaking Hospice Family Caregiver study in 2020, we commissioned Porter Research to conduct a research study of 300 home healthcare consumers, defined as patients and family caregivers who experienced skilled home healthcare within the past 12 months, regarding their experiences with home healthcare agency communication.

The study revealed that home healthcare providers are falling short when it comes to communicating with the consumer in real-time.

The healthcare environment changed in a matter of weeks in 2020.  Now in 2021, we are living a new normal where remote patient support has become a critical aspect of home-based care and if implemented correctly can increase patient and family caregiver satisfaction, improve care team collaboration and drive organizational efficiency.

Innovation in communication to help the family caregiver

President & CEO Edo Banach of NHPCO sits down with Citus Health Co-Founder and CEO Melissa Kozak, RN, to discuss the importance of innovation in patient, caregiver, and provider communication.  Melissa and Edo discuss how easy and open communication democratizes health care “from Park Avenue to the park bench.”. 

As part of the Citus Health lunch & learn session at the NHPCO Leadership Conference in March 2021, we surveyed over 50 hospice leaders to understand the challenges their organizations face when communicating with family caregivers and IDG team members, the solutions they use to communicate, and how well their EMR connects with key clinical stakeholders in the care continuum.  We are sharing the survey results with you.

How Parkway Specialty Pharmacy Reduced Delivery Confirmations from Days to 48 Hours

Patients continue to press for more virtual care options from their healthcare providers to meet their increasingly digitally focused lives better. And as research tells us that timely, accurate delivery and care coordination make up 70% of patients’ overall satisfaction, it is more important than ever for specialty pharmacies to deliver patient engagement solutions that enable a more patient-focused, digital experience. Parkway Specialty Pharmacy is one specialty pharmacy leading the way to innovate their patient engagement capabilities and expand beyond traditional communication methods.

Founded 10 years ago with only two employees, independent Parkway Specialty Pharmacy has quickly grown, now servicing an average of 1,200 patients per month across the U.S. and all its’ core therapies, including self-injectable and specialty infusion medications and home and in-office infusions treatments. To best meet the demands of an increasingly digitally-enabled patient base, the Parkway leadership team knew they needed to incorporate more effective, virtual communications into their workflows. They were also looking to improve response times and gain better data insights to ensure faster and more accurate reporting for referral partners and manufacturers that would be critical to growing their business.

A new report from SmartBrief and Citus Health, takes an in depth look at how the competitive landscape, demand for data and COVID-19 challenges are the driving forces behind the increase in specialty pharmacies adoption of virtual care technologies.

“There’s an app for that” is something we never heard before the iPhone was introduced in 2007. Today, we hear it all the time because innovators built small, purpose-built, apps that solve specific problems. Because not all users have the same problems, apps exist for different solutions. We don’t replace our phones every time we want to do something new, we just add an app, and our phones get new functionality – that’s the “App Store” innovation model.

Specialty pharmacies have long fulfilled a critical need by providing remote support for severely ill patients who require in-home medication. With the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, specialty pharmacies found the spotlight on some of the challenges they still face with the real-time, virtual patient support and care team collaboration required to ensure timely refills, contactless delivery, and the data needs to prove efficacy.