The LTC Innovation Blog

LTC Technology Leader Integrates with Healthcare Technology Provider to Deliver Innovative Vaccine Management Solutions to LTC Landscape PITTSBURGH, March 9, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- SoftWriters, the leading long-term care pharmacy management provider, today announced an integrated partnership with healthcare technology provider, Iron Bridge, designed to help long-term care pharmacies streamline and simplify the dynamic COVID-19 vaccination roll-out process with innovative technology solutions.

The most recent occupation-specific data available from the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics — which dates back to May 2019 — shows that there were about 322,000 pharmacists and approximately 422,000 pharmacy technicians employed in the U.S. at that time. Given that such numbers are from well before the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic upheaval that followed, you can only assume that things have changed to at least some degree since then. (More recent data is available on the health care sector as a whole, as part of the BLS monthly Employment Situation update; it illuminates that there's been some small, give-and-take fluctuation between the final months of 2020 and the first month of 2021. But it has no precise snapshot of pharmacy personnel employment.)

Parkinson's disease is among the most complex conditions to face — not only for patients but also for caregivers and other health and pharmacy professionals involved in the field of long-term care. The disease's degenerative nature means that by the time post-acute and LTC facilities get involved, patients are at Parkinson's most difficult stage.

For virtually all professionals, even those who've returned to a physical location (or weren't ever able to telecommute), work as a whole is far different than it was just a year ago. This is certainly true of those working in LTC pharmacies, not unlike other areas of health care. But one thing that isn't much different is the urgency — it's always been an incredibly hectic environment: facilities' prescription orders need to be processed and fulfilled. Paperwork must be completed with pinpoint accuracy to ensure proper reimbursement and keep the pharmacy compliant. The supply chain from drug vendors has to be monitored to mitigate the risk of shortages or delays.

Although we've crossed over into a new year, the world at large won't necessarily feel that different for many people, due to the persistent health hazard and societal upheaval stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic. Those working in various facets of the U.S. healthcare sector — particularly elder and long-term care, which has seen more death than other areas of caregiving by far — feel this burden even more acutely. Depression, anxiety, and the onset of post-traumatic stress disorder are hardly uncommon.

SoftWriters' training team brings our mission to life by sharing their knowledge of best practices and solution functionality with our customers, which in turn helps those LTC pharmacy operators provide better patient experiences and outcomes. In this edition of "Meet the Team", we spoke with Courtney Hetler-Findlay, who is not only an application trainer but also our in-house teacher known for her thorough curriculum content, extreme knowledge of and affinity towards FrameworkECM, mad organization skills, and overall willingness to help others. Let's get to know a little more about Courtney:

Operation Warp Speed (OWS) is the coordinated effort between a number of federal agencies to accelerate the research, discovery, and production of a safe and effective vaccine for COVID-19. Among these are the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Department of Defense.

There is no corner of the health care sector that has gone unaffected by the primary or secondary effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Those in the long-term care field, such as assisted-living facilities and the pharmacies that serve them, experienced some of the most severe strain on their resources in the early months of the crisis as the disease hit the elderly much harder than virtually any other demographic group.