Welcome to Release #5, Prescription Home Delivery!
Our mission at Alchemy is to ensure that our pharmacies meet patients where they are, and this means enabling a robust home delivery program: for patients, clinic staff, and delivery drivers. As discussed before, the number one reason a patient transfers their prescription to a nearby retail pharmacy is to avoid driving back to the clinic for a refill. Often, another more conveniently located pharmacy is available.
Implementing a robust and compliant home delivery program has been a huge area of focus for many of our Covered Entity partners. Often, it makes sense for them to have both a home delivery program and mail order program, where they hire their own driver to do deliver medications to patients and other clinic locations.
Release #5 Highlights =>
✅ Prescription Check-In at Satellite Location
✅ Patient Consent and Delivery Details
✅ Driver Drop-Off
Why Invest in a Home Delivery Program?
Home delivery of prescriptions via a driver is one of the highest retention opportunities for an in-house pharmacy program, which makes both clinical and financial sense. A home delivery program can increase medication adherence and ensure the highest potential capture rates. We recommend that all our partners invest in both home delivery and mail order programs because some patients will have specific delivery needs for their medications that are better served through home delivery than traditional mail. Managing a robust and compliant home delivery program is complex - and we provide the entire digital infrastructure needed to support a best-in-class pharmacy home delivery program.
Prescription Check-in
We designed our prescription check-in features through the lens of our Covered Entity partners - that need the flexibility to support multiple clinic locations as well as home delivery of prescriptions directly to patients. Additionally, a driver may be dropping off medications at a partner site, for example a recovery or addiction treatment facility. Another common way our partners use the check-in feature is when they are dropping off an injectable therapy to a clinic location ahead of an upcoming patient visit.
“At Raphael Health Center in Indianapolis, we drop off medications every week at the Salvation Army location. Oftentimes, these patients don't have access to their phones and we needed to still provide the same level of tracking and traceability for 340B and PBM compliance purposes, so they use the Prescription Check-in feature every time they drop off medications at the Salvation Army." -Brian Franks, Head of Pharmacy Ops, Alchemy
Patient Consent and Delivery Details
As with enabling a robust and compliant mail order program, we implemented similar functionality for our home delivery offering, taking into account the needs of patients, clinic staff, and delivery courier/driver. We ensure that Covered Entities must receive consent and a signature from every patient (for each refill).
It is critical to understand the different needs of patients across a Covered Entity’s patient base. But why does a Covered Entity need both a mail order and home delivery program? Well, what happens when a patient is homeless and lives out of a pickup truck - a real-life situation we experienced in Oklahoma City. Additionally, many patients do not want medications arriving at their home, as they may want further discretion regarding their HIV or Hep C status and so home delivery also allows for a patient to specify a specific location for prescription drop-off, i.e. “the McDonald’s near the gas station.” Often what someone may imagine as edge cases for most patients, turns out to be the reality on the ground for many underserved patients we serve, and we’ve factored all of this into our prescription drop off functionality.
Courier/Driver Drop-off
The last leg of the journey involves dropping off the medication with the patient. We’ve taken into account some basic route mapping and features to ensure a seamless experience for a driver. After delivery, drivers can complete the drop-off by adding notes about the delivery. For example, they may have left the package on the front porch or handed it to another family member, all of which is documented to ensure Covered Entities can manage and scale their home delivery program with ease.
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