How much time does your clinical team spend managing medications?
Try ballparking the time and resources it takes to maintain a supply of stock medications: ordering and reordering, keeping up with expiration dates, administering over-the-counter (OTC) meds and billing them to the right resident or patient, and more. You may be surprised at the costs involved over and above the simple acquisition cost of the items. Not to mention the issues that may arise during an audit.
And did your organization really sign up to be in the pharmacy business?
House stock management and one-day cycle virtually eliminate waste
Amber Fisher, Director of Nursing at John Knox Village Care Center in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, recognized the value of Symbria’s house stock management program a few years ago. According to Amber, combined with Symbria one-day cycle compliance packaging, a service that delivers each resident’s daily medications every day, the house stock program has virtually eliminated waste at John Knox Village.
“We used to destroy a lot of medications because they would expire,” Amber said. “We kept a supply cabinet, and we needed to assign nurses to manage it. We need to keep our clinical people on the floor, not in a med room.”
Bill the right item to the right resident
“It wasn’t just that the medications would expire,” she said. “We were often eating the cost of the meds that we were administering to residents. The aspirin or supplements just would not get billed to the residents receiving them.”
Symbria’s house stock program includes OTC medications in the resident-specific strips produced for daily medications. Those items – along with the prescription drugs – are billed to the resident’s payer, whether it be the community for a Medicare Part A patient, the Part D plan for covered items, or to the resident’s pharmacy account for non-covered items. The program is available to communities using any of Symbria’s cycle delivery plans: one-day, seven-day, or 14-day.
“Not only do we no longer have a house stock supply,” said Amber, “we also have streamlined med passes for our nurses. The OTC items are right there in the strips, so nurses don’t have to search the med cart for bulk stock items. There are other benefits as well: infection control is improved when containers are not handled by multiple people, and there are fewer opportunities for errors.”
Benefits come with a trusted partner
“We have had other pharmacy providers ask to call on us, but we are just not interested,” Amber said. “Symbria’s team are great communicators and very responsive. And we appreciate the support they offer through programs like one-day cycle with house stock management.”
“The pharmacy business is our business,” said Symbria Director of Pharmacy Ryan Cable. “We understand the challenges of managing a skilled nursing or assisted living community, and we do everything we can from a pharmacy perspective to help our client communities help their residents.”
Symbria: Trusted Partner. Proven Outcomes.
For more information about Symbria’s One Price plan, call 630.413.5824 and they will connect you with the appropriate Director of Business Development.