Dean Riggott Photography
Surescripts
Discover more savings with clinical equivalents
When a medication has cost or coverage barriers, presenting an appropriate alternative can save the day. But it’s not easy for busy organizations to maintain a current, comprehensive, clinically validated knowledge base of therapeutic alternatives.
Surescripts Therapeutic Alternatives gives you more than 30,000 evidence-based drug pairings via a clinical catalog that’s updated weekly to add new clinical insights and remove discontinued drugs. Whether you use it to improve prescription benefit plan design or present clinicians with options they’ll be happy to substitute, Therapeutic Alternatives can help reduce costs for patients, payers and pharmacies alike.
>30,000
evidence-based alternative pairings
>200
therapeutic categories represented
What can Therapeutic Alternatives do for you?
Choose your organization type to see how Therapeutic Alternatives can help you provide cost-effective medication options with less effort.
Expand the impact of your therapeutic alternatives programs
Make consistent alternative recommendations in every line of business, including commercial, Medicare and Medicaid. Offer enhanced insights across your teams, whether they’re working on the P&T committee, prior authorizations, plan design, formulary modeling or customer service.
Provide alternatives with confidence
Leverage one comprehensive and continually updated source of truth for clinical equivalents, backed by our own dedicated P&T committee and full-time clinical teams.
Guide member and provider behavior
Make it easy for members and their care teams to choose preferred, on-formulary or generic options by providing alternatives.
Avoid manual work and lengthy research
Receive the latest clinically validated data every week in a universal format that supports all drug compendia and arrives ready to upload into your systems.
Compete effectively with fewer resources
Build savings opportunities into plan cost and formulary design without sacrificing clinical efficacy—and without scaling up your team or technology.
How it works for PBMs
Subscribe to the clinical catalog to begin receiving alternatives.
Surescripts sends you a file of evidence-based alternative pairings via Secure File Transfer Protocol.
Integrate the clinical catalog into your internal tools and systems.
Data arrives ready to support teams across your organization, including utilization management, formulary and beyond.
Use the data to improve service to plans, providers and members.
Deploy these insights to help meet performance guarantees, surface better options in real-time benefit tools and more.
Get updates every week.
Clinical catalog updates are published weekly to add new clinical insights and reflect drugs currently on the market.
Give your members the best, most cost-effective medication options
Support your members and your business with evidence-based alternatives for use in plan design, prior authorization, Medicare Part D compliance and more. Identify plan-year or recurring savings opportunities across conditions and therapeutic classes, bringing more insights to your relationship with your PBM.
Provide alternatives with confidence
Leverage one comprehensive and continually updated source of truth for clinical equivalents, backed by our own dedicated P&T committee and full-time clinical teams.
Improve member and provider experience
Make it easy for members and their care teams to choose preferred, on-formulary or generic options by providing trustworthy information, creating exceptional customer service.
Avoid manual work and lengthy research
Receive the latest clinically validated data every week in a universal format that supports all drug compendia and arrives ready to upload into your systems.
Strengthen your market position
Gain deeper insight into alternatives to improve formulary modeling. Influence HEDIS and Medicare Part D Star Ratings through cost-effective benefit management.
How it works for health plans
Subscribe to the clinical catalog to begin receiving alternatives.
Surescripts sends you a file of evidence-based alternative pairings via Secure File Transfer Protocol.
Integrate the clinical catalog into your internal tools and systems.
Data arrives ready to support teams across your organization working on plan design, formulary modeling and beyond.
Use the data to improve member support and customer service.
Make it simpler to provide alternatives during processes like prior authorization or real-time benefit checks.
Get updates every week.
Clinical catalog updates are published weekly to add new clinical insights and reflect drugs currently on the market.
Offer clinically relevant alternatives for patients
Give pharmacists more power to identify appropriate medication options, helping improve collaboration with prescribers and keep treatment on track.
Provide alternatives with confidence
Leverage one comprehensive and continually updated source of truth for clinical equivalents, backed by our own dedicated P&T committee and full-time clinical teams.
Get prescriptions to patients faster
When a prescription is rejected, costs too much or requires prior authorization, make it simple for pharmacists to tell them about other viable, cost-effective options.
Get faster responses to change requests
Make it simple for prescribers to approve an updated prescription by including potential alternatives in the request.
Gain a competitive advantage
If a prescription can’t be filled or picked up as written, retain business by quickly suggesting an appropriate alternative.
How it works for pharmacies
Subscribe to the clinical catalog to begin receiving alternatives.
Surescripts sends you a file of evidence-based alternative pairings via Secure File Transfer Protocol.
Incorporate the clinical catalog into your clinical reference tools.
Data arrives ready to help create a comprehensive therapeutic alternative resource for use by stores and pharmacy teams.
Pharmacists can consistently suggest clinically appropriate alternatives to prescribers.
Even when data is not supplied by the patient’s benefit plan, pharmacists can easily offer clinically validated options.
Get updates every week.
Clinical catalog updates are published weekly to add new clinical insights and reflect drugs currently on the market.
A clinical catalog built with clinical rigor
Our clinical experts take a multifaceted, comprehensive and nuanced approach to assigning alternative pairings. Here are a few of the factors they consider.
Dosage strength comparison
Alternative pairings take into account equipotency for alignment across dosage forms, such as when moving from an injectable to a tablet.
Read more
Read less
Indications and treatment guidelines
Our team considers both primary and less common medically accepted indications, as well as treatment guidelines for each medication.
Read more
Read less
Clinical evidence
We incorporate findings from evidenced-based, head-to-head studies as well as other clinical differentiating factors.
Read more
Read less
Find out more about Therapeutic Alternatives
What kinds of use cases is Therapeutic Alternatives designed to support?
The Therapeutic Alternatives clinical catalog provides clinically rigorous evaluations based on indications, guidelines, dose-form variety and other clinical differentiations. This information can be used to:
- Provide alternatives to a prescribed treatment that has inadequate response, intolerable side effects, high costs, prior authorization requirements or other factors
- Expand alternative lists for use in formulary management or utilization management
- Surface alternatives within benefit check tools or following prior authorization denials
These alternatives are especially valuable within complex drug classes.
What kind of clinical expertise goes into Therapeutic Alternatives?
We have a full-time clinical team dedicated to Therapeutic Alternatives, including physicians, pharmacists, clinical monograph pharmacist writers and data scientists. We also have a dedicated pharmacy and therapeutics (P&T) committee of pharmacists and physicians representing areas of practice such as psychiatry, nephrology, family practice, pain specialist, geriatrics, oncology, endocrinology and general pharmacy.
Does my organization need to be using any particular drug database/compendia?
No. The Therapeutic Alternatives clinical catalog is universal and maps to popular databases such as Medi-Span and First Databank.
How often will I get clinical catalog updates?
We make updates available to all active customers every week. Updates include additional therapeutic alternative pairings, drug code changes and new drugs on the market.
Can we make custom alternative assignments once we start using the clinical catalog?
Yes. Think of the clinical catalog as a customizable reference tool. Once subscribed, you are free to use and adapt it in whole or in part within your own tools and systems.
How do I access the Therapeutic Alternatives clinical catalog?
Once you subscribe, you’ll receive the clinical catalog and weekly updates. To get started, contact your Surescripts account representative or click “Get in touch” below.
Keep pace with healthcare innovation
Connect with our team to explore how we can partner to increase patient safety, reduce costs and ensure quality care.
Get in touch