Surescripts Innovations Help Patients Get Started on Specialty Medications Faster

Prescribers, Pharmacists and Hubs Are Leveraging Surescripts Enhanced Technology to Improve Efficiency and Speed Time to Therapy

ARLINGTON, Va. – March 8, 2022 – In 2021, Surescripts expanded its specialty medications solutions to enable more prescribers, pharmacists and patients to benefit from the accelerated speed to therapy these innovations support. By deepening its clinical intelligence capabilities and expanding disease states and medications included, Surescripts is helping prescribers, specialty pharmacists and hubs get more patients started on specialty medications faster and giving them more time to spend on patient care instead of paperwork.

“Specialty medications often require specialized expertise and documentation to manage. The process is complex today and takes an average of two weeks to get a patient on their medication,” explained Mike Pritts, Chief Product Officer of Surescripts. “Our solutions significantly reduce the back and forth phone calls and faxes that currently plague the specialty prescribing, fulfillment and onboarding process by filling information gaps with clinical and medication intelligence, which helps patients get on their medications sooner.”

By integrating with Surescripts Record Locator & Exchange, Surescripts new clinical intelligence capabilities help specialty pharmacists fill prescriptions more quickly by pulling clinical data from more than 600,000 providers connected through Carequality. Surescripts also expanded its offerings to include 120 additional specialty medications and 14 additional disease states, including asthma, allergies, Hepatitis B and C, and infertility.

"Innovation in the specialty prescribing process helps to create better informed, more efficient and safer care decisions,” said Brandon Griesel, Product Management Director, Accredo. “Ultimately, this helps physicians and pharmacists focus on what’s most important – providing specialized care for patients facing complex diagnoses.”

In 2021, Surescripts solutions were used more broadly to simplify specialty prescribing, fulfillment and onboarding. For instance:

• The number of Specialty Medications Gateway transactions initiated by specialty pharmacists more than doubled.
• The number of prescribers enabled for Specialty Patient Enrollment increased by more than 38%.
• Specialty pharmacists filled e-prescriptions for more than 18 million specialty medications across 4,385 national drug codes.
• Prescribers used Real-Time Prescription Benefit 1.55 million times to find more affordable specialty medications.
• Using Real-Time Prescription Benefit, prescribers saved patients an average of $264 per specialty prescription.
• The number of prior authorizations processed electronically, including those for specialty medications, increased 66%.

Specialty medications now account for more than half of medicine spending in the U.S., and retail prices for widely used specialty drugs increased at more than three times the rate of general inflation in 2020. Meanwhile, the burden of prior authorizations is increasing, with 57% of pharmacists reporting an increasing number of requirements, and a quarter say they still use fax machines to process them.

Visit Surescripts.com or booth #438 at ViVE 2022 to learn more about how Surescripts is simplifying the specialty medications journey.