Opinion piece highlights DME ePrescribing adoption barriers, solutions
Faxing is an inefficient and unreliable way to order medical equipment and supplies for patients, so why is the industry slow to transition to ePrescribing? In a HomeCare Magazine opinion piece, we discuss the barriers to adoption and how to overcome them, with a focus on how to look past faxing to a comprehensive technology solution. We advocate for a platform grounded in transparency, accountability, and simple, purpose-driven workflows to improve ordering practices and patient outcomes.
At Parachute Health, we talk about the benefits of DME and HME ePrescribing a lot. On a full-service DME/HME ordering platform like ours, these include quick order submission, automated documentation checks, multiple options for clinician eSignatures, in-app chat and communication, and end-to-end order tracking.
Such features improve efficiency and ensure clean, correct orders make it from submission to fulfillment in a fraction of the time required for fax-based ordering. Healthcare workers can reclaim time lost on paperwork, suppliers can be confident about fulfillment, coverage, and payment, and patients get crucial medical equipment and supplies without long waits.
But, as we note in HomeCare, faxing and other dated methods of DME/HME ordering still represent about 80 percent of orders, with healthcare workers dependent on brittle “systems of sticky notes, handwritten cheat sheets and long lists of phone or fax numbers as workarounds”.
So what’s going on here? First, there are a lot of competing health tech companies in all parts of the healthcare sector clamoring for signups and touting impressive benefits, but not all of them deliver on their promises. This means that for overburdened, under-resourced healthcare workers, it can be hard to know who to trust. Also, limited time to devote to learning new systems means many healthcare workers are reluctant to take risks on new health tech tools.
“To earn users’ trust, the makers of healthcare tech have a responsibility to understand their needs, then make sure the tech they build adequately addresses those needs. ... Ethical tech entrepreneurship must involve efforts to support exhausted healthcare workers and repair stressed healthcare infrastructure.”
In HomeCare, we explain that “to earn users’ trust, the makers of healthcare tech have a responsibility to understand their needs, then make sure the tech they build adequately addresses those needs.” Further, “ethical tech entrepreneurship must involve efforts to support exhausted healthcare workers and repair stressed healthcare infrastructure.” This should include effective training, onboarding, and education about how to properly use the product and its features for maximum benefit.
The Parachute Platform’s delightfully simple ordering experience for providers is a good example of this: most new users see their order submission time drop by 25 percent between orders one and 10, and for fully trained users, order submission time is three minutes or less, and as little as one minute with EHR integration.
Meanwhile, suppliers on the Parachute Platform enjoy the benefits of seamless communication and being able to connect with providers or payers through a simple user interface, which translates to accurate revenue cycle management and tracking as well as reliable, timely payments.
The secret sauce of why our tech works so well for the healthcare workers and other users we serve isn’t really a secret at all: Parachute Health is a company built for healthcare workers and DME/HME users by people with deep experience as healthcare workers and people who rely on medical equipment.
Our growing team includes people who have long healthcare backgrounds, people with loved ones who are healthcare workers or who rely on DME, and people who rely on DME themselves — in fact, Diana is among our DME-reliant team members! We know the impact of inefficient processes and poor healthcare delivery around DME, and we know we can’t afford not to take action.
To learn more about our advocacy positions, recommendations, and the key ingredients of good DME ePrescribing tech, check out the full writeup in HomeCare Magazine.
