Personal Homecare Pharmacy

The Background

The traditional method of managing prescriptions involves physical paperwork, which often leads to delays, increased administrative overhead, and potential risk of errors.

Recognising the need for a more streamlined, secure, and efficient process, PHP embarked on a mission to modernise prescription management while ensuring compliance with healthcare regulations.

The Challenge

Previously, the prescription process was manual and paper-based. Hospitals would post scripts, creating a lead time of several days between the script being signed and it being received. Upon receipt, there was a laborious process of digitising the script and then filing it away. 

The paper-based approach often had challenges for PHP, such as duplicate prescriptions or difficulties locating a prescription when required (due to a misfile). The end-to-end process was very time-consuming and required a lot of matching and checking, often lacking efficiency.

From 2013, PHP worked with another e-signature provider, however made the switch to E-Sign in 2018 due to the fact that it is UK-based and offers better governance, particularly in terms of data being stored within the UK.

The Solution

In 2018, PHP partnered with E-Sign to implement electronic signature technology in its prescription processes. This partnership laid the foundation for more efficient workflows across the organisation and its trusts. 

E-Sign provided PHP with a robust and secure e-signature solution tailored to the unique needs of the homecare sector. Our solution offered PHP greater flexibility, compliance, and seamless integration into its existing systems.

The Results

The integration of E-Sign with PHP has transformed the pharmacy’s operations. Key results include:

• Enhanced efficiency – the time taken from prescription signing to receipt has reduced by 83% and continues to improve. 
• Operational time savings – for the two trusts fully onboarded with E-Sign, approximately 22 hours of processing time have been saved, based on an average of 2.5 minutes per posted document.
• Improved compliance – ensured adherence to regulatory requirements with secure and auditable processes.
• Sustainability – minimised paper usage contributed to PHP’s environmental goals. The organisation has already saved approximately 239kg of carbon emissions.
• Patient-centric care – faster prescription processing translates to timely delivery of medications, enhancing patient satisfaction.

E-Sign Support and Future Partnership

Personal Homecare Pharmacy feel that their experience with E-Sign has been very good. The organisation plans to onboard all of its clients with the solution and go completely paperless.

Using E-Sign’s APIs has allowed PHP to enrich the customer experience through insights around the document signing process, what stage each document is at, and what (if any) bottlenecks exist.