Expert: Improving Infusion Care Through Smarter Scheduling and Analytics

At the 2025 American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) Midyear Clinical Meeting & Exhibition, Prateek Bhatia, BPharm, PhD, vice president and general manager of Intrafusion at McKesson, discussed the complexity of infusion operations. He emphasized the importance of understanding the full patient journey, from therapy selection and benefit verification to scheduling and clinical care management. Bhatia highlighted that high-cost infusion drugs require careful coordination across insurance verification, inventory management, and patient scheduling to ensure timely and effective care. Technology, including artificial intelligence (AI)-driven tools, plays a critical role in managing multiple infusion centers, therapies, and varying infusion runtimes. Bhatia also highlights the importance of data and analytics in optimizing infusion service lines and preventing patient leakage or script capture decline.

Pharmacy Times: Can you introduce yourself?

Prateek Bhatia, BPharm, PhD: My name is Prateek Bhatia. I'm the vice president and general manager for Intrafusion by McKesson, which is McKesson's infusion management business. We essentially help our customers, which include health systems and community clinics, optimize their infusion services for their patients.

Pharmacy Times: How can health systems streamline infusion workflows to reduce administrative burden and give staff more time with patients?

Bhatia: The way I think about infusion operations, it really begins with understanding the actual therapy that a patient is put on by their providers. From that point onwards, the level of complexity when it comes to these very high-cost drugs starts with understanding the patient's benefit verification in terms of insurance coverage for these drugs and ensuring that these drugs are ordered in time by the health system. That involves inventory management and control and ensuring that the patient has a great experience when it comes to scheduling for their infusion appointment. All of the clinical care management needs to happen before and after. For a given health system, understanding the level of complexity from the beginning all the way to infusing the right product at the right time for the patient is very critical. A good combination of understanding the process and having the right technology in place to automate many of these processes is a great start.

Pharmacy Times: What role do technology and data tools play in improving infusion chair scheduling and utilization?

Bhatia: Technology plays a huge role, and increasingly so with the advent of AI. Many health systems have multiple infusion centers that they are operating, and many have different types of therapies or therapeutic areas that they might be infusing. Many of these products and therapies have different infusion runtimes. Some go for 30 minutes, and some go for a couple of hours. To understand all of these 40 or 50 infusion therapies that a given health system might be infusing for multiple patients at multiple sites is difficult to do manually or without technology. Having the right technology that has all of the therapies optimized within the EMR platform or a scheduling software and understanding how many patients are going to come in for that day is important. Understanding how much time each patient needs before the infusion and after the infusion for observation is also important. Having the right technology to add all of those data points and come up with a scheduling alignment is very important.

From an analytics standpoint, it is important to understand the optimization of the infusion service line by understanding how many patients begin their infusion at a given health system and the subset of those patients who stop their infusions for various reasons. This includes patients getting infusions at a different location or stopping infusions completely. Having a good understanding of leakage or script capture is very important. Technology and analytics play a very important role in optimizing existing infusion operations and preventing script capture decline.