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Home Infusion Therapy… Without the Paperwork

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For patients with conditions that require medication to be infused by needle or catheter, staying at home for treatment is optimal. Not only is it more comfortable and more manageable for them, but infusion-based treatments in hospitals and outpatient clinics — particularly for those who suffer from chronic disease — is an unsustainable expense that is climbing in the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere.

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Home-based solutions are quite simply a must in order to ensure effective and efficient health care delivery in markets across the globe. And there’s no question that home infusion therapy —  whether it’s led through pharmacies, home care agencies, or other key stakeholders — is increasingly in demand. In fact, globally, the market is expected to reach $31.9 billion USD by 2022. Government legislation is also fueling growth, with Medicare for example expected to approve a rising number of home-based health care services in the next few years in a bid to limit the burden on hospitals. 

Clearly, there is room for agencies to capitalize on the home infusion market. Yet, as with so much of health care, there can be an administrative process on the back end that can quickly grow sluggish. The main daunting element is paperwork. Without an end-to-end software solution to address the significant reporting requirements, agencies may risk not fully tapping the potential of the home infusion market because of administrative inefficiencies.

Move the ‘Manual’ out of Home Infusion Reporting 

The main group of professionals that administer such therapy in people’s homes and clinics are nurses. While it’s clear that nurses’ time is best spent caring for patients, it is too easy for them to get caught up in paperwork with the reporting demands of home infusion. 

For starters, nurses generally must file a post-injection or post-infusion report, manually on paper. These reports are clearly very important for patient care, as many elements must be noted in order for clinicians to confidently monitor patients while they are at home. For example, one of the key clinical metrics to capture are adverse events: the first-hand proof of whether a body is tolerating and benefiting from a particular medication. Vitals that fall from the safe or expected range, fevers, fainting, incomplete doses, patient-reported complaints: these types of important details must be notified to all that patient’s care team.

All of it must be reported. Yet when this time-consuming task is done manually on paper, it means a nurse’s time isn’t spent doing what they are expertly trained in treating the next patient. Electronic reports change this dynamic entirely, and the best software solutions will aggregate all the information a nurse is collecting quickly and easily. 

Through modern technology, the burden of post-infusion reports can be lifted, helping agencies thrive and their nurses stay engaged. 

Home Infusion Electronic Documentation

Documenting client visits electronically has clear benefits for home infusion. Pharmaceutical clients see increased value in their products, which solidifies relationships and leads to more expedient payments from those clients. Such technology is looked upon very positively — because people know the right data collection is mutually beneficial for patients and providers.

The right software, usable by nurses, administrators, schedulers, and anyone involved in a client’s care, accurately captures metrics in real time. At AlayaCare, our flexible software can evolve with an organization, meeting future business needs or regulatory requirements. For home infusion, AlayaCare’s ability to capture vitals remotely is an added benefit in ensuring both accurate and timely completion of post-injection and post-infusion reports.

Our home infusion software is built with APIs that integrate all types of data from multiple sources — all accessible up to the minute. Nurses can report easily on a device and the information flows straight to those who need to receive it.

Without home infusion electronic documentation, nurses are left filling reports by hand and then faxing, scanning, or even mailing it back to those who need it. This is not only high-scale inefficiency, but it also increases the risk of errors with wrong numbers and other pitfalls that then need more time to be adjusted. This inefficiency spirals: managers spend time printing off reports and scanning them into a pharmacy or agency’s system; pharmacies have records that are not up-to-the-minute and must rely on patients’ word-of-mouth in some cases; billing departments wait for slow-moving notes from nurses in order to bill for services.

Home infusion is a fast-moving target. To do it well means employing the right technology. Ideally, it should fit smoothly with software that does everything else for an agency simultaneously. Request a demo any time to see how we do it.


Watch the live platform tour of AlayaCare’s home and specialty infusion software, in addition to a Q&A on why our client CSI Pharmacy chose AlayaCare.

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