Why We Built This: A Network of Innovation

Disruptive. Unmatched. Groundbreaking. 

It’s how healthcare technology innovation is described in seemingly every headline we read.

There's so much being done in every corner of healthcare and there are endless possibilities for what’s next.

But instead of trying to be the next disruptive innovation, we’ve always asked the question: how is this innovation going to make healthcare better for patients and everyone caring for them?

From our roots in establishing e-prescribing forward, Surescripts has been innovating on a massive, systemic scale for over two decades—making sure patient information flows securely and seamlessly across the entire network.

Innovation Is in Our DNA

More than two decades ago, Surescripts developed and helped establish electronic prescribing across the country by bringing together pharmacies, pharmacy benefit managers, health systems and the technology vendors that serve them. It was a groundbreaking innovation in healthcare technology.

Now, Surescripts is leading healthcare interoperability at scale, with nearly 22 billion exchanges of patient clinical and benefit information across the network, covering virtually every U.S. patient and linking to 2.03 million healthcare professionals and organizations.

At this scale, every new technology or process innovation we introduce needs to work across our complex health system. Every change we make has an amplified impact across millions of healthcare professionals and hundreds of millions of patients.

It's a significant responsibility. That means we focus on three things when it comes to innovation: impact, simplicity and collaboration.

We Innovate for Impact

We focus on innovations that have a positive impact on the lives of patients and the people who serve them, not just new disruptive technologies.

For instance, we’ve enabled pharmacists to ensure safe, accurate dosing by alerting specialty pharmacists to clinically significant weight changes in 11% of cases with Specialty Medications Gateway.

We measure success in things like money saved for patients, time saved getting started on a medication and better prescription pickup rates. And as a result, we’ve increased prescription fill rates by 8.1 percentage points when prescribers used Real-Time Prescription Benefit to identify lower-cost medication alternatives.

We Innovate for Simplicity

We make delivering great care more efficient with intuitive workflows and automation that operates behind the scenes. For clinicians, this means fewer disruptions, less potential for confusion and safety risks, and less administrative burden and burnout.

We continue to innovate to make workflows far more efficient with tools like Electronic Prior Authorization, which one study found cut the average time from request to decision by more than two-thirds. In addition, technologies like our message queue service, data validation and Sig IQ help deliver complete and accurate health intelligence automatically, so users don’t need to step outside their workflow.

We Innovate in Collaboration

We focus on innovations that work at scale, across complex systems, not just in isolated pilots and pockets. And we’ve built a network of innovation by convening and collaborating with stakeholders across healthcare to make sure that a new innovative technology is truly solving challenges for everyone who has a role in caring for patients.

Surescripts E-Prescribing transactions like RxChange and CancelRx make the prescription process more efficient and more collaborative for prescribers and pharmacists.

We’re innovating to streamline communication between health plans and pharmacy benefit managers with Clinical Direct Messaging. In 2022, four health plans and two pharmacy benefit managers covering nearly 220 million patients nationwide used Clinical Direct Messaging to improve medication adherence, close gaps in care and reduce hospital admissions.

What’s Ahead

We’re working to make the disruptive parts that exist today simpler, innovating to make clinical interoperability an everyday reality across the country, while continuing to support the evolution of patient care teams and ensuring value-based care is successful--just to name a few.

Ultimately, it’s not about Surescripts being innovative—and were not striving to be one of those companies disrupting healthcare just for the catchy headline.

We’re innovating to deliver on our purpose, to help healthcare heal itself, and help our partners work together across the network to ensure clinicians are providing safer, better informed and less costly care to the patients in their care.