Dean Riggott Photography
Surescripts
“The most important thing that we need is information,” says Alexis Wiles, Pharm.D., of Kroger Specialty Pharmacy. On the Pharmacy Podcast Network, I had a conversation with Wiles and David Wiegand of eMDs about what the future holds as we optimize the specialty journey.
Information when and where you need it means:
- Getting patients to therapy more quickly
- Less paperwork for overburdened office staff
- Productive collaboration between prescribers and pharmacists
Over a quarter of adults in the U.S. are facing multiple chronic conditions today, and an estimated total of 164 million Americans will face chronic conditions by 2025. Many (though not all) of these conditions require specialty medications to treat. And as the American Journal of Managed Care reports, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a record number of specialty medications in 2021.
With more specialty medications coming to market in the coming years, improving the specialty workflow is a necessity—and it’s doable right now.
Listen to the podcast below and glimpse the future of specialty prescribing and fulfillment.
I mention on the podcast that I love my job, and a big reason I love my job is that I know there’s a better way to get patients started on therapy faster. It’s about having clinical information when and where you need it—directly from the electronic health record (EHR) software at eMDs to Kroger Specialty Pharmacy, for example.
And it means one less phone call. It means one less fax.
Electronic solutions like Specialty Patient Enrollment and Specialty Medications Gateway streamline the delivery of clinical information that needs to go from Point A to Point B.
Specialty Patient Enrollment automates the specialty enrollment process by embedding enrollment forms in the e-prescribing workflow and securely sending required information to specialty pharmacies and hubs.
- Specialty Patient Enrollment saved up to two hours every week on administrative tasks at three physician medical practices. One practice reported that phone calls from pharmacists looking for clinical data were cut by almost half.
Specialty Medications Gateway lets specialty pharmacists retrieve the clinical information needed to dispense a specialty medication from the patient’s electronic health record without relying on the prescriber.
- As of May 2022, specialty pharmacists can use Specialty Medications Gateway to access patient information supplied by more than 200,000 prescribers nationwide.
“We have the information,” says Wiegand. “How do we get it to the specialty pharmacy?” Listen to Wiegand and Wiles explain how in our podcast above, then learn more about how a smarter specialty process leads to a swifter start to treatment.
