Elly Yates-Roberts |
One of the UK’s leading home health providers was looking to leverage technology to build an intimate relationship with their patients to provide them quality service for managing their health. The provider specialises in handling complex logistics of contracting medication vendors and distribution according to provider regulations and patient preferences. They bring specialised treatment to over 200,000 patients from the comfort and convenience of their own homes across the UK and Europe.
Mazik Global, acquired by Quisitive, was chosen to deliver a solution for patient scheduling, call centre, case management, field services, advanced warehousing, materials management, talent management, and finance and operations. Serving over 175,000 patients with chronic conditions ranging from skin disease to Crohn’s Disease to cancer, the organisation provides patients with nurse visits, prescription management and delivery, wellness self-management through apps, and much more. This project would revamp internal business processes using through improvements to the patient experience, caregiver collaboration, operations, and profitability. The organisation’s new digital platform is based on MazikCare which runs on Microsoft Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Azure.
Together, the provider and Quisitive started by thinking through the patient journey to find ways to innovate and eliminate friction points. One of the friction points at the top of the list was the 4-hour window for each nurse visit. Some patients were frustrated at staying at their home for such a long stretch of time, and sometimes, nurses arrived at a patient’s home to find nobody at home. The new digital platform enables nimble patient and nurse communication, resulting in a reduction of the waiting window by 50 per cent to two hours, which doubles each nurse’s capacity to five patients a day while reducing patient frustration and nurse burnout.
A big factor in achieving health outcomes is dispensing and taking prescribed medicines and interventions as they were intended. Studies show that patients typically take only 60 per cent of their medicine prescription when left on their own to manage a prescription. Each reminder raises the likelihood of a patient taking the prescribed dose by 36 per cent. The new digital platform automates the dose-taking nudges, and artificial intelligence is used to provide the nurses with a prioritised list of personal reminder calls that would have the biggest impact to patient outcomes through adherence to their medical prescription regimen.
Every day, the provider prepares thousands of devices, non-refrigerated medications, and refrigerated medicines for delivery. At a warehouse, each item is scanned, repackaged, labelled, and organised for each patient, and then placed into the correct nurse’s delivery kit. Temperature control is important, and the team has identified new ways to manage the supply chain to keep those temperature-sensitive medications safe and reduce waste. National regulations require the provider to monitor each prescribed dose as it moves through from the originating pharmaceutical company to the patient.
Until now, there was only visibility into two points along each prescribed item’s journey – when it arrived at the warehouse, and when it was delivered to each patient’s home. The new approach provides visibility into every step along the way, starting with prescription creation and ending with each time a dose is taken by the patient. Besides meeting and exceeding governmental compliance requirements, nurses grow their understanding of each patient’s adherence, which increases the lifetime value of the customer. The aggregated information is used by pharmaceutical companies to understand drug efficacy in light of patient’s adherence to prescription regimens. The new approach to managing the warehouse and supporting patients grows the dispensary throughput to two times its original level, increases accuracy, timeliness of prescription delivery, eliminates refrigerated prescription medicine waste, and improves patient outcomes.
As the provider continues to innovate on its digital platform, it is identifying how to grow the products and services it can offer patients, both directly and through new partnerships.
Over the past few years and months, people have grown more comfortable with services at home – telemedicine, in-person medical services, food delivery, shopping, or learning. A digital platform and a strong partnership with Quisitive have given the provider an edge on satisfying their patients while improving their medical outcomes, with a digital platform that enables them to innovate for years to come.
This article was originally published in the Winter 21/22 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.