Automating Compliance Packaging to Improve Medication Adherence
Despite consistent efforts to deliver top-quality, patient-centric care, medication non-adherence remains a serious concern for stakeholders across the healthcare landscape—and long-term care (LTC) is certainly no exception.
The consequences of nonadherence are significant across the board, especially for older and vulnerable patient populations in LTC facilities, who are often at higher risk of adverse events when nonadherent because of their age or the prevalence of chronic conditions. With that said, medication packaging, administration, and management can be a challenge when patients and facilities have such varying needs and preferences.
Fortunately, innovations in pharmacy packaging are empowering LTC pharmacies and their facility partners to optimize medication packaging, adherence, and administration. There’s where compliance packaging comes in. Unit-dose or multi-dose compliance packaging provides an efficient, reliable way for LTC and post-acute facilities to ensure residents take each and every medication exactly as prescribed.
Let’s explore how compliance packaging helps improve medication adherence and how automation solutions purpose-built for long-term care can streamline the process.
What Is Compliance Packaging for Multi-Dose Medications?
Compliance packaging, sometimes called adherence or convenience packaging, is the specialized bundling of drugs in one package for multi-medication patients. Different types of compliance packaging are available to meet various needs, including blister (or “bingo card”) packs and strip packs, which are the most commonly used medication packaging in long-term care facilities.
Blister and strip packaging is broken down for each patient by day, date, and time of administration, with medication names and dosing instructions clearly labeled to avoid confusion. In other words, each package includes all the relevant information necessary to administer medications with precision and efficiency. Barcodes can also be added for fast, easy scanning to prevent any medication administration errors.
Each LTC patient, facility, and department may have unique compliance packaging needs. For example, your pharmacy might send strip packs to one wing of a facility and blister cards to another. The key is identifying what will work best to effectively aid LTC nurses with administering multiple medications per patient, per day—and then finding a solution to help you bring it to life for each of your LTC facilities.
Improving Medication Adherence with Compliance Packaging
The need for compliance packaging in LTC facilities is clear: Research shows the average LTC facility resident takes around 8-9 prescription medications each day and 12-13 different prescription medications over the course of a month. As such, LTC nurses are often scrambling to stay on top of administering multiple medications per day for every patient—all on top of so many other responsibilities.
Using compliance packaging for multi-dose medications offers a simple and organized way to support adherence, especially in patients with complex drug regimens. It helps reduce administration errors by making it easy for LTC facility staff (or even caregivers at home) to recognize whether each particular dose has been taken or missed.
According to the Study to Measure the Impact of Pharmacists and Pharmacy Services on Medication Non-Adherence (STOMPP), patients who used blister packs achieved 45 percent greater adherence compared to their pill bottle counterparts. Patients also almost immediately reached medication adherence rates of 80 percent and reached 90 percent compliance by the end of the clinical trial.
How Using Packaging Automation Technology Can Help
Automation technologies like FrameworkLTC pharmacy software can help streamline specialized compliance packaging by allowing pharmacies to easily fulfill any custom packaging requests for multi-med patients without adding manual work or increasing staff hours.
Packaging automation technology allows LTC pharmacies to set customized “rules” for their customers in order to personalize packaging based on specific patient and facility preferences, such as whether one unit prefers blister packs to strip packs or vice versa. Solutions for automating compliance packaging proved particularly beneficial during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when many LTC pharmacies and facilities struggled with shifting guidelines and unprecedented challenges.
Along with streamlining packaging workflows and helping to improve medication adherence, automation technology can also result in reduced costs for your LTC pharmacy. By working more efficiently and minimizing errors, you can operate as smoothly as possible while providing unmatched services tailored to each facility.
Moving Forward with FrameworkLTC’s Pharmacy Software
There are numerous benefits to using LTC pharmacy software such as FrameworkLTC. One of the biggest is facility-centric customization, or the ability to customize your pharmacy software to meet the unique needs of various long-term care and post-acute facilities—right down to specific nursing stations.
Meeting compliance packaging requests is just one example of facility-centric customization in practice. FrameworkLTC’s built-in pharmacy operations tools allow you to set precise packaging specifications for each of the facilities you serve. Easily establish automated packaging according to specific qualities, single- or multi-dose package preferences, type of compliance packaging, and more.
Along with facility-centric customization, FrameworkLTC also offers additional workflow automation capabilities, real-time data, integrated data management, rules-based design, industry-leading interfacing with more than 100 LTC-specific solutions, inventory and cost of goods management, and more. It also integrates with the entire Framework suite of solutions, including systems for electronic management, delivery management, business intelligence, interfacing, barcode scanning, and medication regimen review.
Best of all? With the integrated solution set, all of these products are conveniently accessible in one centralized location for ultimate ease of use and efficiency.
Schedule a demo to learn how FrameworkLTC can help you maximize your pharmacy margins, compete for new facility business more effectively, and eliminate manual tasks to create more efficient workflows.