Health Catalyst Embedded Refills

The Health Catalyst Embedded Refills application provides embedded medication renewal decision support directly in the EHR workflow, allowing providers and their staff to streamline prescription renewal workflows. The combination of technology, protocol content, and workflow optimization enable health systems to deliver a better, safer patient experience.

When a renewal request is received, Embedded Refills reviews the patient chart for relevant data and compares it against more than 1,000 protocols to determine whether the request is safe to renew. Refill Management then summarizes data from the patient’s chart and recommends next steps (e.g., approve the renewal, follow up with the patient to close care gaps, etc.).

Embedded Refills automatically reviews patient charts for relevant renewal data, thus eliminating the need for manual review and reducing processing time per renewal from 2+ minutes to less than 1 minute.

The problem

Health systems often see inconsistent renewal processes between departments, providers, and other clinical staff. This misalignment results in inefficient workflows and can create confusion. Prescription renewal tasks often require additional follow up, which reduces the time available for patient care and increases the risk of provider burnout. Challenges include poor use of physician and staff time, inability to consistently and effectively delegate refill tasks, delayed response time to patients, and increased error rates in medication management.

Our approach

Health Catalyst develops and maintains a library of medication protocols based on the latest industry recommendations and guidelines. These protocols provide a starting point for consensus discussions. Our teams build customized protocols to align with your organization’s standard of care. Protocol criteria include dosage, controlled substance rules, care gaps (e.g., overdue office visits and missing labs), and more.

By continually monitoring more than 40 of the leading guidance sources (JAMA, FDA, CDC, American Diabetes Association, American Heart Association, etc.), the Refill Management team can make timely recommendations for protocol changes that may impact an organization’s workflows and safe delivery of care.

Benefits and features

• Save provider time—and reduce provider burnout. Reduce the number of renewal requests needing provider review by up to 60 percent. Refill Management is fully embedded in the EHR workflow and promotes safe delegation of requests from providers to staff.
• Automate documentation in the EMR. After reviewing each request against the appropriate protocol, Refill Management publishes a note with recommendations right in the EHR workflow. Staff completing the request immediately know if the renewal meets protocol criteria, has care gaps, can’t be delegated from providers (e.g., controlled substances), is a duplicate, or has errors (e.g., wrong dosage, not on active medication list, etc.).
• Increase quality through standardization. Provides more than 1,000 evidence-based, customizable prescription renewal protocols, which enables consistent care delivery across a health system and positively impacts quality measures.
• Proactively identify care gaps and increase revenue. Referencing the evidence-based protocols, Embedded Refills identifies outstanding care gaps (e.g., missing labs, past-due visits, etc.) for a patient’s active medications at the time of any prescription renewal, and alerts the staff member completing the request so that care gaps can be closed.
• Automate patient outreach. Leverage the power of Twistle Patient Engagement by Health Catalyst to automatically notify patients of prescription refills—saving time and money.

Use cases

• A healthcare system wanted to offload tasks from clinicians so that staff could operate at the top of their license and focus on the patients in front of them. The organization's goal was to centralize the refill service and delegate these routine tasks to nonclinical technicians. The team found that Refill Management helped them achieve that goal. Today, more than 65% of the healthcare system’s refills are processed by nonclinical technicians, and technician efficiency has increased threefold.
• A patient-centered medical home was looking for a way to consistently create capacity for its medical assistants so they could spend more time with patients before every provider visit. Prescription renewal workload had grown, reaching 10,000 requests per month. Though medication protocols were in place, they were not consistently followed, creating a liability for the organization. As a solution, the organization implemented Refill Management to standardize and delegate much of the renewal process. The results: 60% fewer requests sent to providers, 30 refills processed per hour, and turnaround time reduced to 24 hours.