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Our “Together as One” series spotlights nurses, physicians, pharmacists and others who positively impact the lives of hospice patients and their families every day. Through the dedicated and compassionate work of these inspiring professionals, patients receive the high-quality care and attentive consideration they deserve. Together with innovative and responsive hospice partners, they create the network of support so essential to hospice care. We invite you to meet the people behind the mission—and see what one can do.

KCinnamon Dowling, RN

Our “Together as One” series spotlights nurses, physicians, pharmacists and others who positively impact the lives of hospice patients and their families every day. Through the dedicated and compassionate work of these inspiring professionals, patients receive the high-quality care and attentive consideration they deserve. Together with innovative and responsive hospice partners, they create the network of support so essential to hospice care. We invite you to meet the people behind the mission—and see what one can do.

Amanda Gutierrez, RN

Have you seen the NewsBriefs report on the U.S Department of Health & Human Services Office of Inspector General’s review of Medicare Part D claims? Are you curious what it means? Come talk to the OnePoint Patient Care hospice pharmacy experts during the NHPCO Management and Leadership Conference. Find us at booth #423.

When Compliance Means Change

Managing a successful hospice program means also managing the rigmarole of regulatory compliance. While keeping up with paperwork and potential change in the compliance climate can be cumbersome,...

Are Patient Principal Diagnosis Ratios Impacting Your Hospice's Bottom Line? 

No two hospice patients are the same. And yet, part of the challenge that hospice leaders face is knowing how to plan effectively for the year ahead when so much depends on those patients and the time they spend in hospice care.

Over time, a hospice program can identify probabilities and trends that can help with advance planning and resource distribution, from inventory management to staffing and budget allocation.

One data trend that should be closely monitored...

 Best Practices for Ordering Controlled Substance Prescriptions 

Handling Errors

What happens if pharmacists discover an error in a controlled substance prescription?

Nobody’s perfect. Mistakes happen, including when writing prescriptions. While some errors can be corrected easily, others require a do-over, particularly in the case of controlled substances.

OnePoint Patient Care’s highly trained pharmacists are skilled at noticing mistakes and correcting them when legally permissible, with the goal of getting accurate medication to patients...

OnePoint knows that patient care is your top priority. During busy days spent juggling responsibilities, you need medication ordering to be easy, fast and—just as importantly—accurate. With OPPC as your pharmacy partner, you will enjoy peace of mind that your medication orders will be timely and correct.

With a 99.997% medication dispensing accuracy rate and a 99% customer retention rate, we’ve earned the trust of hospices nationwide by focusing on the details.

For every medication order, we follow our carefully crafted four-step quality...

OPPC’s mission to provide our patients, their caregivers and their family members with the highest quality of care, reliability and support means that we take the issue of drug diversion extremely seriously.

Medications are prescribed for many reasons, usually for labeled indications but other times off-label. Knowing why medications are prescribed is essential to help understand the continued need for therapy as well as to determine payment responsibility in this time of Medicare Part D risk. 

Namenda (memantine) is well known for its labeled use in treating cognitive decline in patients with moderate to severe Alzheimer's disease. However, its off-label, and potentially related, uses may be less known; for example in managing symptoms such as...

Ketamine is currently enjoying a surge in popularity. Though the year 2017 is still young, a PubMed search of articles with “ketamine” in the title limited to 2017 showed that there’ve already been 106 such publications released this year. Practical Pain Management named oral ketamine for pain management as their Practical Clinical Advance of 2016.

Earlier this year, I delivered a webinar called “What’s So Special about Ketamine? A Review of Its Uses at the End of Life” to a national audience of our hospice partners. Judging by both the...

^{(Photo by Derek Gavey, CC BY 2.0)}

There is a lot of buzz about the “opioid epidemic” our nation is currently facing, but haven’t opioids always been popular? According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the number of deaths due to opioid overdoses has more than doubled since the year 2000 ¹. In fact, in 2014 alone, 61% of overdose-related deaths were due to an opioid.