4 Ways to Improve Health Literacy at Your Pharmacy - BestRx

4 Ways to Improve Health Literacy at Your Pharmacy

Posted on Feb 21, 2024

Health literacy and addressing gaps in care have been a priority for health care providers and pharmacists alike. Certain patient populations are more prone to these disparities, including those who live in rural areas, have transportation issues, physical and cognitive impairments, or speak a non-English language at home.

When patients don’t understand their health care providers and/or their treatment plan, it can lead to mistakes, non-adherence, and reduced health outcomes. Fortunately, there are several ways to reduce or close these gaps in care. Here are four simple ways to improve health literacy at your pharmacy:

Accessible Labels

When a patient leaves your pharmacy, they rely on prescription labels for their dispensing instructions. However, traditional labels may not work for those with visual impairments like blindness and low vision. Through our partnership with ScriptAbility, BestRx pharmacies have access to multiple accessible label options, including:

    • Braille Labels
    • Large Print Labels
    • RFID-Enabled Talking Labels

Offering accessible prescription labels at your pharmacy enhances the safety of your patients and improves medication adherence by ensuring everyone has access to vital treatment information.

Language Translation Services

One of the biggest challenges to improving the health literacy in the Unites States, is a lack of easily accessible resources for non-English speaking patients. According to the Census Bureau, approximately 21% of the US population speaks a language other than English at home. That’s one in every five adults and that number has only continued to rise in recent years. Without readily available information, these patients may turn to alternate sources, which are not always reliable.

That’s why BestRx is proud to offer an integration with Meducation, providing pharmacies with a variety of simplified medication instructions and personalized prescription labels. This includes access to:

    • 30+ Languages
    • Larger Font Sizes
    • Visual Aids/Videos

In fact, Meducation’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology and translated libraries of pre-built phrases cover instructions for most self-administered medications. Once phrases are developed in English, they are sent through a series of quality assurance steps to prevent contextual mistranslations. That way, pharmacies can feel confident that they’re providing all their patients with prescription information that’s easy-to-understand and accurate.

For pharmacies that only need support for a few languages, BestRx also offers an integration with RxTran to translate SIG directions. This way, pharmacies can select the languages most prevalent in their community to ensure they are able to provide the same level of care for all potential patients. Plus, with RxTran, the price is based on the number of languages supported, so the pharmacy is only paying for the exact number of languages needed.

Patient Outreach

Following up with your patients is an essential part of the care you provide. Most pharmacies are already providing medication counseling and other services to ensure every patient understands what their medications are for, how to take them, and what side effects they may encounter before they leave the store. However, it’s important to make sure you’re checking in with patients after they leave your pharmacy as well. Medication adherence often starts to dwindle over time, so it’s important to check in and see how they’re doing and remind them when they’re due for a refill or have a prescription ready for pickup. This doesn’t mean you have to spend hours on the phone either – a simple email or text reminder will help!

BestRx also offers third-party integrations, like Pleio’s GoodStart program, which aims to increase adherence for patients who have been prescribed a new medication for a chronic health condition. Often, patients starting on long-term medications encounter a variety of emotional barriers to adherence, including uncertainty and financial concerns. The GoodStart program helps to overcome these barriers through peer-to-patient outreach, providing patients with the information and support they need to start and stay compliant with their medications.

Unit/Multi-Dose Packaging

Although it’s been around for a while unit/multi-dose packaging continues to be an easy, impactful way to ensure patients understand when to take their medications. This is especially true for elderly patients, and anyone on multiple prescriptions. Instead of handing the patient several individual prescription bottles with separate instructions, all the patient’s prescriptions are dispensed together in single-use packets according to the time they should be taken.

Whatever method (or methods) you use, it’s important to take steps to ensure you’re providing consistent, quality care for all your patients. Spend some time identifying the different languages prevalent in your community, the availability of different health care services and other accessibility issues that may be impacting the health literacy in your area. Then, you can leverage your pharmacy software to close those gaps!

If you’re interested in learning more about BestRx and its accessible solutions, request a free demo.