What are the needs of your patients? Answering this question can help you determine how best to help them. Maybe you need to provide better service hours for patients who can’t leave their job during the day. Maybe you need to upgrade your online presence.

Whatever it is, your patients want you to be more attentive to their needs. They don’t want to have to tell you how to improve. Instead, they want you to recognize what you can do better and make those changes.

However, if you were to ask your patients how you can better serve them, it is likely they will provide you a list that looks something like this: don’t make them wait so long to see you; allow them to involve their family in their treatment; allow them to pick up their prescriptions and refills at your office; provide safer forms of medicines; spend more time with them; and communicate better.

These are just a few demands they may want you to meet. How you meet those demands is key, with utilizing the best online technology you can find.

 

Upgrade Your Technology

Your practice needs to provide services, information and communication more readily available to patients. With today’s technological capabilities, your patients should have access to their records, education about their diagnoses, and even the ability to make appointments for services outside of regular hours.

Ways to meet demands of patients better is to use a web based portal or system, one that gives your patients a direct line to your office, so they can get information on demand. If you are prescribing at the point of care, you already know that the technology systems provided in conjunction with this service are phenomenal and provide your patients with what they desire.

They also provide you and your staff with round the clock access to service technicians. This same web-based system allows you to easily communicate with insurance companies, order supplies and dispense medication to patients.

 

Dispense Medicine In-Office

Providing your patients with their prescription at the time of their appointment, meets many needs of your patients. It saves them time, money and provides them with an extra layer of privacy.

The use of prepackaged medications can also help you avoid many of the errors that happen at the pharmacy, like cross-contamination or incorrect labeling.

Cross-contamination can happen. People do not realize this, but medicines can be handled by pharmacy technicians and pharmacists that can pass germs to their medicines. While many pharmaceutical staff wear gloves, they do not change gloves often.

Germs and bacteria can travel a distance through sneezing and coughing. These germs can land on the preparation table where staff are working, where medicines are placed.

Prepackaged medications prevent germs from getting onto medicines. The prepackaging companies have state of the art equipment that must pass federal and state laws surrounding cleanliness.

 

Provide the Safest Environment for Services and Products

When you choose to work with a prepackaging company, you are choosing the safest medicine to give to your patients. In addition, the environment within your practice is required to meet exceptional standards set forth by the federal and state governments.

Prepackaging companies provide everything a physician needs to properly store and distribute medicines to their patients. Doctors are given lock storage boxes that protect the medicines until it is time to distribute.

In addition, prepacking companies can offer temperature-controlled storage containers to physicians who need to keep some medicines cold and others at room temperature.

Everything from temperature to drug reminders to labeling to package forms are taken into consideration when providing you and your patients with high quality products. In fact, quality control procedures are used to ensure safety and to prevent degradation of medicine prior to expiration date, which is clearly marked for patients to view.

All these steps make omitting the pharmacist an easy decision.

 

Omit the Pharmacist

If your patient has a question about his or her prescription, they wait for the pharmacist, who is already bogged down, to speak with them. While pharmacists are excellent at what they do, they just don’t have the time needed to dedicate to each customer.

Pharmacists rarely take the time to talk to patients about drug interactions. In fact, an undercover investigation by the news show 20/20 revealed that 70 percent of the pharmacies they visited did not take the time to tell patients about potentially harmful interactions.

On top of that, pharmacists make more mistakes when filling prescriptions under stress and an overwhelming workload.

In-office dispensing may prevent errors such as these.Prepackaged medications come in safety packs with easy to understand instructions. They are assembled in laboratories that follow extremely strict guidelines set forth by the Federal Drug Administration and the Drug Enforcement Agency.

When you no longer need to use the services of a pharmacy, you eliminate any potential dangers for your patients. You have more input, control and assurance that your patients are being given the right medicine, at the right dosage.

 

Make Communication a Priority

Improving communication with your patients will bring about positive changes in your patient’s attitude towards their health and improved follow-through with treatment plans. Knowledge is power for your patients. The more you can educate them on their illnesses, the more they can recognize the importance of following your orders.

The technology used with in-office dispensing makes providing education to patients simple. With just the click of a button, you can print data in an easy to understand format for your patients. Your patients can also log into the dispensing portal to seek further information on their medicine, interactions between medications, and how to contact you if needed.

Meeting patient needs does not need to be difficult. With just a few adjustments in how you provide services, you could quickly see much happier patients. In-office dispensing of prepackaged medication sets both you and your patients up for great success.