Faster Meds, Enhanced Care: How One Specialty Pharmacy Makes a Difference

As a patient, it can be frustrating to have to tell the same story over and over with every provider you see. But that doesn’t happen at PerformSpecialty. “We’re already in the conversation when we talk with patients,” says Jonathan Doles, Pharm.D. “We understand their history.”

Imagine that you have multiple sclerosis (MS), a chronic neurological condition with no known cure, but one that can be managed with specialty medications. You were diagnosed just a week ago, and your doctor recommends treatment as soon as possible.

There’s just one problem: You must wade through the work of actually getting your specialty medication, which can take weeks. And narrating your entire medical history for the umpteenth time is the last thing you feel like doing.

What if the specialty pharmacy already knows what it needs to know about you?

Intelligence Sharing = Less Time to Dispense

If specialty pharmacies already had the information needed to dispense the prescribed medication, it might not take as long to get patients to therapy. But specialty pharmacies typically don’t have all the information they need.

This is no one’s “fault” per se.

Rather, it’s about not having—until recently—the technology to support robust clinical intelligence sharing. So, the pharmacist will need to pick up the phone and call the doctor. Paperwork will need to get faxed back and forth. And the patient will be asked for their history once again.

That’s why pharmacists at PerformSpecialty started using Specialty Medications Gateway.

Turnaround in Days, Not Weeks

“We’re not their first pharmacy,” Doles says about his patients, so his aim is to make the patient’s transition to his pharmacy as smooth as possible. “They’ve been through multiple pharmacies. They’ve had to tell the same story. That’s where we can make an impact.”

They make an impact (and contribute to quality metrics) in part by using Specialty Medications Gateway. This solution accelerates access to patient-specific clinical information, safely and securely, directly from their providers’ electronic health record (EHR).

Doles and his team have used Specialty Medications Gateway for nearly two years now—since April 2022—and their turnaround time from when they receive the prescription to when they reach out to the patient for expedited delivery is now 2.5 days, start to finish.

That’s a far cry from the three to four weeks it can take to get a patient started on a new specialty medication.

It’s About the Patient

“We pride ourselves on being a Medicaid-focused pharmacy,” says Alexander Vinicombe, Director of Operations Management, PerformSpecialty. “Our mission is to provide for underinsured populations.”

At the center of PerformSpecialty’s “Venn diagram” is the patient, who sits squarely in the middle of two distinct pressures: being underinsured and facing a serious condition like MS, hepatitis or cancer.

Every second counts.

Not only is the turnaround time just 2.5 days, but of 585 patients searched using Specialty Medications Gateway, clinical documents were returned for 527 of them (based on searches conducted between April 2022 and July 2023). That’s a 90% return rate—and the Surescripts average is 80%.

When pharmacists at PerformSpecialty save time and effort, so do their patients.