How EQUIPP Copilot Powers Patient Care at King's Pharmacy

In this episode of the Quality Corner Show, PQS by Innovaccer host Emily Endres speaks with Anthony Thakar, a pharmacist at King's Pharmacy in Brooklyn, New York, about how his team is using the EQUIPP Copilot to improve patient care and streamline their workflow. King's Pharmacy is a busy operation, filling 1,200 to 1,500 prescriptions per week with a 12-13 person staff.

In this interview, Thakar explains his pharmacy's team-based approach to patient care and how EQUIPP Copilot provides seamless integration.

Transcript

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00:00:00:23 - 00:00:21:14

Anthony Thakar

EQUIPP Copilot is really helping. Like it works hand in hand with us. And in our workflow there is no extra work, to be honest. Meaning, software does most of the things itself, and whenever we open any profile or we type a new prescription, then it starts working and loading on the side.

00:00:21:16 - 00:00:41:18

Anthony Thakar

It will pop up. It will give, give us like, small number one, number two, or the patient's initials. Let's say if it is John Doe, it will just say like JD sometimes. So we, we understand that okay. The copilot is suggesting something at this point. So that's a really nice pop up. We really like that.

00:00:41:18 - 00:01:01:08

Anthony Thakar

We don't have to go separately or we don't even have to remember that. Okay, let's check this patient in our, patient adherence program. No program reminds us to work on this patient and then integrate. If there is any opportunities available or if there is any, documents to be submitted, something like that.

00:01:03:06 - 00:01:03:15

Unknown

Oh.

00:01:04:01 - 00:01:07:24

Voice Over

Welcome to the Pharmacy Quality Solutions Quality Corner Show,

00:01:08:15 - 00:01:13:19

Voice Over

Buckle up and put your thinking cap on. The Quality Corner Show starts now.

00:01:14:19 - 00:01:35:23

Emily Endres

Anthony, thank you so much for joining us today. Let's start by just learning a little bit more about you. Tell us who you are. What's your role? The pharmacy you work for. And give us just a little bit of insight into, you know, more about your pharmacy. Where is it located? How busy are you? How large is your staff?

00:01:35:23 - 00:01:41:05

Emily Endres

How many patients are you serving? So just give us an intro into to you. Into your pharmacy.

00:01:41:09 - 00:02:05:04

Anthony Thakar

All right. Thanks for having me. My name is Anthony. I work in King's Pharmacy. Nice to meet you, Emily. I work in Brooklyn, where pharmacy is located, across the, Kings County Hospital. And we have about, 12 to 13 people, staff and, like, 6 to 7 pharmacy staff. And the front staff is separate.

00:02:05:06 - 00:02:34:05

Anthony Thakar

Especially, the staff inside the pharmacy, they are mainly educated for patient counseling. And if they have any more questions or additional clinical questions, the pharmacists jump in. Otherwise, they would, you know, handle it at the time of pick up and, or maybe drop off of the prescriptions, whenever any patients want. We do about 30 to 35 patients.

00:02:34:07 - 00:02:47:03

Anthony Thakar

counseling, I would say per week. And, out of that, only few of them have additional questions. Otherwise just normal questions like, what is this medication for? Or how many refills? Blah, blah, blah.

00:02:47:09 - 00:02:53:11

Emily Endres

Yeah. Perfect. Thank you. Anthony. How many scripts would you say that your pharmacy is filling a week then?

00:02:53:23 - 00:02:58:06

Anthony Thakar

I would say about, 1200 to 1500, scripts per week.

00:02:58:13 - 00:03:22:17

Emily Endres

Okay. So that's a pretty busy pharmacy. And I really appreciate your, thought process around the separating some of the duties. And it sounds to me like you've taken an opportunity to empower parts of your staff or persons within your staff to do some initial points of clinical consultation at the pick up and drop off window. Is that right?

00:03:22:17 - 00:03:44:22

Anthony Thakar

Yes. That's correct. Absolutely. Most of the talking, to patients happens, at the pick up counter or if not, they sometimes they call and it happens over the phone as well. And we, we provide delivery services. If any patient has questions at that point, they have to call us back. And pharmacist, interacts with them later on.

00:03:46:04 - 00:03:59:14

Emily Endres

Fantastic. And and can you give us a bit of an insight into how have you trained those staff members to handle those consultation questions and touchpoints with your patients?

00:04:00:04 - 00:04:22:23

Anthony Thakar

Yes. So to keep it short. I would say our staff is, trained when the challenges comes and when, like, every day work, our workflow is set up in a way that, we try to call patients as soon as the bag is ready. So patients first questions will be like, what is it for?

00:04:22:23 - 00:04:44:14

Anthony Thakar

I just have got this medication or item. I don't I'm not ready for refills. So then, we try to educate, or if the person over the phone who will be like, oh, you know, this is your blood pressure medication, you have to take it. You cannot miss it. Or, if it is something else for cholesterol medicine, if something the doctor has changed.

00:04:44:16 - 00:05:10:01

Anthony Thakar

So at that point, the conversation happens. Mainly everybody learned with their experience. Our staff is pretty old here. I would say, maybe between 10 to 20 years. Everyone stays. So they learn from their experience. We don't have to teach them much. And they remember most of the patients. Then they know how patient is expecting from them.

00:05:10:03 - 00:05:19:01

Anthony Thakar

They know how to talk to each other and, also, patients are taking medications (for) years, so they already know what it is for.

00:05:20:01 - 00:05:54:19

Emily Endres

Fantastic. Okay, Anthony, I'm going to summarize really quickly here. I think you gave us a lot of really helpful nuggets already in the introduction part. So what I hear is it takes a team based approach. Doing training and support for your team members has been part of the success that your pharmacy has been able to recognize. So training them to do those, touch points of medication consultation, helping to describe to your patients the why, why it's important for them to follow up and take these medications.

00:05:54:21 - 00:06:37:15

Emily Endres

And also, you've created a really fantastic culture and environment to work in. So kudos to you and the King's Pharmacy team. That's fantastic. Now yeah you mentioned workflow. So you've got all of, these staff members that are oriented to address certain parts of the pharmacies, just kind of natural workflow. And sounds to me like you are already working on your success with some of the payer sponsored adherence monitoring programs, and one in particular that you're participating in, has allowed you to adopt some additional or new technology within your pharmacy workflow.

00:06:37:17 - 00:07:01:19

Emily Endres

So I wanted to open up the conversation around essentially, there's a lot of different pharmacy software programs out there. You have a lot of competing priorities in the pharmacy. How have you been able to successfully integrate this new technology that you have, which is the EQUIPP Copilot sponsored by one of the health plans that you are participating with.

00:07:01:21 - 00:07:12:18

Emily Endres

How have you adopted that into your workflow? And if you have any specifics on how that is potentially impacting your day to day, we would love to hear a little bit more.

00:07:13:13 - 00:07:36:16

Anthony Thakar

Okay. Yes. As the name says, copilot, EQUIPP Copilot is really helping. Like it works hand in hand with us. And in our workflow there is no extra work, to be honest. Meaning, software does most of the things itself, and whenever we open any profile or we type a new prescription, then it starts working and loading on the side.

00:07:36:18 - 00:07:56:20

Anthony Thakar

It will pop up. It will give, give us like, small number one, number two, or the patient's initials. Let's say if it is John Doe, it will just say like JD sometimes. So we, we understand that okay. The copilot is suggesting something at this point. So that's a really nice pop up. We really like that.

00:07:56:20 - 00:08:16:10

Anthony Thakar

We don't have to go separately or we don't even have to remember that. Okay, let's check this patient in our, patient adherence program. No program reminds us to work on this patient and then integrate. If there is any opportunities available or if there is any, documents to be submitted, something like that.

00:08:16:10 - 00:08:30:08

Anthony Thakar

On top of that, we when I learn more about this program, I came across two, better option, two options like enhanced, I would say enhanced functions services.

00:08:30:10 - 00:08:58:04

Anthony Thakar

for controlling blood pressure. And the other one is LAMP which is like longitudinal adherence monitoring program. I'm going to talk about the second one later on. But the first one I would say that in our pharmacy particularly, we have a blood pressure monitoring chair. So patients, it's completely free. They can just come sit.

00:08:58:05 - 00:09:17:08

Anthony Thakar

They can measure their, blood pressure. And if they have any questions, if they are going through something, they can talk to pharmacist and as I said, we are right across the hospital. So we are I mean, we can recommend them to go to emergency room or something if there is serious, situation.

00:09:20:16 - 00:09:52:06

Emily Endres

Fantastic. Okay. So sounds like the copilot has been really instrumental in helping to provide some efficiencies in the workflow that you already had with this great subset of employees within your pharmacy. And the pop up happens, you understand the alerts that are available and opportunities that are available for the patient. While you're filling a prescription for them. So thanks for walking us through how that impacted your day to day in your pharmacy workflow.

00:09:52:06 - 00:10:09:00

Emily Endres

Okay, so, Anthony, since the copilot is just an overlay on top of your pharmacy management system, tell us a little bit more about the ease of use and how quickly you and your staff are able to access the features and functionality of it.

00:10:09:10 - 00:10:43:03

Anthony Thakar

Yes. So, that the biller, typer, and the pharmacist, they can, check that this copilot installed on everybody's computer, it's completely free and user friendly. They don't have to, really check anything. As I say, that's the copilot will jump in or pop up, and show the, (I mean) as a reminder that, this patient has some opportunities available and, we didn't have to really do much is only the new additional thing.

00:10:43:03 - 00:11:08:00

Anthony Thakar

I would say we have to be a little bit techie about it. That okay, how the program works? And it is very efficient and user friendly. So we can always download the, patient list. We can, see through the graphs available charts available on the dashboard. We can always, focus on the low numbers and then bring it up high.

00:11:08:00 - 00:11:12:22

Anthony Thakar

And then that way we can complete our opportunities and documentation.

00:11:13:05 - 00:11:35:04

Emily Endres

Yeah. That's fantastic. So I think you noted a couple of really cool features about the copilot. And one is, as we've talked about this overlay for enhanced services opportunities, where, whether it's the adherence monitoring program controlling blood pressure, you're able to, interact with those patients at the point of care, do your documentation within this fly out.

00:11:35:07 - 00:11:55:04

Emily Endres

But as you just noted, Anthony, you also have the same capability that you have in the EQUIPP web app where you can see all of the patient list, you can download those lists, because sometimes that's more helpful if you're engaging lots of folks within your staff, like you are, to work on some of these clinical care opportunities.

00:11:55:11 - 00:12:33:04

Emily Endres

Yeah. So one of the features within the copilot that we just talked about, let's dive in just a little bit more around the documentation feature. When you have patients that have opportunities for enhanced services, how tell us a little bit about the utilization of that document feature. Is it intuitive, do you feel like that's allowing you to participate more in these payer sponsored programs and is it helpful with the visibility into revenue that that, documentation tool provides to you through the copilot?

00:12:33:23 - 00:12:57:16

Anthony Thakar

So, yes, it has enhanced services. And, it's easy to use as well. I mean, as we can click on the opportunities, let's say any diabetes patient has any opportunity, we can click on it and we go to the next page. It shows us the list of patients. And we click when we click on the patient or maybe start documentation.

00:12:57:18 - 00:13:16:02

Anthony Thakar

The opportunity it will remind us or it will give us the options like how did we reach out to the patient. So it's very like few clicks away. And when we finish it, it's we can save it. I'm not sure how often these software updates, but I would say it's everything is online and integrated.

00:13:16:02 - 00:13:29:15

Anthony Thakar

So within a week or so, it should give us, reports back. I just had a question about that. Do you do you know, how often the, data loads? Once we finish our opportunity?

00:13:30:02 - 00:14:01:00

Emily Endres

That's a fantastic question. So the quick data reloads every week on Friday. So always look on Friday to see if you have additional or new Enhanced Services opportunities for lots of payer programs. You'll also see updated patient level information. So updated adherence scores so that you can continue to track and trend the progress and improvement that you're seeing at a patient level compared to those interventions and outreaches that you're making.

00:14:01:00 - 00:14:02:09

Emily Endres

So it's a great question.

00:14:02:11 - 00:14:04:18

Anthony Thakar

All right. Yes. Thank you for answering.

00:14:04:18 - 00:14:05:22

Anthony Thakar

00:14:05:22 - 00:14:20:19

Anthony Thakar

Yeah. Besides that I, I love it. I have been completing my opportunities and as I said, it's very easy to use like only few of the, I would say 5 to 10 clicks and we can finish any task given all of that.

00:14:21:15 - 00:14:45:03

Emily Endres

Fantastic. Well, we are so excited that this copilot has been able to provide you and your pharmacies, with a, more efficient and optimized workflow process so that you can continue to earn revenue from these payer sponsored programs. I have one more question for you, Anthony. Now that you've seen the power of the EQUIPP Copilot, what else do you think it could solve for you?

00:14:45:03 - 00:14:52:13

Emily Endres

And do you have any thoughts on enhancements or or other functionalities that would be nice to live within the copilot?

00:14:52:16 - 00:15:38:21

Anthony Thakar

Right. So apart from the features that are already there, I would say, one, since everybody is going to AI and automation of every software. So I would say one automation or two automation reporting tools actually, so we can get reports, our reminder every week, or every biweekly that okay this many you if we have like 20 patients last week and now only four patients left out of my list and those patients I can work on following week or this week. A second auto reminders, could have been for patients just to remind them, regarding their adherence, how they keep taking medications or their refills are ready or

00:15:38:21 - 00:16:11:01

Anthony Thakar

they are due for a refill. Some kind of reminders if patients also get then once we get once we come across that patient and once we counsel them, it will be easier for them to, you know, for us to educate them. And, lastly, I would say third feature, I would I mean, I would expect if they can add is, is refill reminder or refill request message, or I would say a fax if it can go to the doctor office from there because we do it from the pharmacy software.

00:16:11:01 - 00:16:27:07

Anthony Thakar

But as I just said, like there is a node section available when we send the refill reminder request to the doctor. So I don't know how they see it from there. And if they can get a fax or some, message on pop up on their end, that would be great.

00:16:27:20 - 00:17:07:20

Emily Endres

Anthony, those are fantastic suggestions. All capabilities that we have within the copilot to build upon, for sure. And I really love and want to hone in on the second one that you mentioned, because what you're doing to improve the quality of care for the patients that you serve, whether it's taking a blood pressure or, counseling that patient after they've said, you know, in your automated blood pressure machine, whether it's, talking through medication adherence and what their regimen looks like, it's, maintaining their, adherence status, etc. it's all around patient behavior, and you have to change that.

00:17:07:20 - 00:17:45:02

Emily Endres

That's what you're really working to do. And that's certainly not easy. So ways that the copilot can help you, generate easier messages or more consumable messages by your patients, I think is a really fantastic idea. So we'll look forward to getting started on those features and enhancements really soon. Anthony, thank you so much for your time. If you had one tip or piece of advice that you would share with any of your peers out there that are thinking about, utilizing the EQUIPP Copilot for digging into payer sponsored programs, what piece of advice would you give them?

00:17:45:04 - 00:18:17:06

Anthony Thakar

Yeah, I have one, two small advices for my peer pharmacies is that everybody knows, that's like a lot of insurances, or reimbursements went down for most of the medications. This is an extra this is an extra benefit as a reimbursement wise or, extra, revenue wise. We can we should take it. It gives both pharmacy and the patient benefit of, patient therapy management and, like, extra reimbursement per prescription.

00:18:17:08 - 00:18:39:05

Anthony Thakar

And it's not time consuming there is no extra work. It just it it's keep happening in the back end and, side by side with your computer system and, that's it. I would say just keep us, one BP monitor, for any patient to just come and measure for it, and then you can submit the data, and then you just get some reimbursement for yourself.

00:18:40:02 - 00:18:40:17

Anthony Thakar

Yeah.

00:18:40:19 - 00:18:41:18

Emily Endres

That's that's.

00:18:41:23 - 00:18:43:14

Anthony Thakar

Yes.

00:18:43:16 - 00:18:54:13

Emily Endres

Easy as that. That's right. Anthony, thank you very much for sharing your story with us today. We appreciate all that you're doing and all that you do for the patients that you serve. Take care. Thank you.

00:18:54:14 - 00:18:56:02

Anthony Thakar

Very much. Likewise.

00:18:56:02 - 00:19:00:11

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00:19:00:13 - 00:19:23:23

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00:19:24:00 - 00:19:39:22

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00:19:39:22 - 00:19:40:05

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