Grane Rx
Improved Packaging to Enhance Medication Adherence

Known as healthcare’s $300 billion problem, medication non-adherence poses a significant threat to the delivery of effective patient care throughout the industry. Many home healthcare (HHC) patients, due to their inability or unawareness to follow medical prescriptions have high rehospitalization rates, which lead to unnecessary emergency visitation costs. The elderly and cognitively disabled patients who live alone find it difficult to familiarize themselves with new medications. Delivering cookie-cutter solutions to healthcare providers treating such patients becomes strenuous and counterproductive for both providers and receivers of healthcare.

Enter Grane Rx: a pharmacy solutions enterprise offering standardized programs and services that focus on improving overall patient care and outcomes to address this persistent problem of medication non-adherence. “We try and set a standard with medication adherence where a patient becomes familiar to their prescriptions through our adherence programs, allowing them to achieve a better quality of life,” says Robert Rowland, president, and COO, Grane Rx. Rowland believes that to personalize and enhance patient care; patients must be approached with more familiarity. “Adherence is critical to our patient population, and all healthcare providers should go the extra mile to ensure the safety of our seniors.”

Grane Rx offers their services to Programs for All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE) programs and their participants to support the elderly and cognitively challenged desire to stay-at-home while supporting PACE providers. This results in reduced hospital readmissions, emergency room visits, and other medical interventions that require additional resources and money. By working collectively with PACE organizations, Rowland and his team educate healthcare providers on how critical the role of medical packaging is in the process of improving medication adherence.

“Patients, on average, have a dozen different drugs prescribed to them; and those over the age of 70 are expected to read the small print on medicine vials,” explains Rowland. Grane Rx prioritizes the need to deliver prescription instructions on packaging more clearly to improve health literacy. “We use a number of different methods to enhance medication literacy including Easy Read pharmacy labels, simplified multi-lingual instructions, and smart medication calendars.”

This pharmacy solution enables PACE participants to live safely in their home while providing PACE organizations more time to focus on participant care. Medications are pre-sorted into convenient medication pouches and are organized by date and time of administration. “We take the guesswork out of what and when you are supposed to take your medications,” says Rowland. Grane Rx provides color coded boxes so participants can easily understand which medications are routine vs. as needed (PRN). Each box includes our literacy tools, pictures of medications and icons to identify time-of-day for when medications are to be taken. Such intuitive packaging features make Grane Rx stand out in the PACE market, which provides home healthcare services to its participants. The company streamlines the pharmacy ordering process for providers through providing custom pharmacy integrations that tie directly into the organization’s electronic health record (EHR) system.

Grane Rx has been serving the PACE industry diligently for over 13 years and sees 2019 as a year of major expansion. “We have opened pharmacies in Philadelphia and Denver over the past four years, and growing geographically is our focus this year,” states Rowland. Along with their geographical growth, the PACE pharmacy solutions provider intends to continue their focus on improving medication adherence—resulting in positive outcomes in the areas of health and the quality of life for the senior population.