Surescripts Further Simplifies Specialty Prescribing and Fulfillment with Diameter Health Partnership to Enhance Clinical Intelligence
Incorporating Timely and Comprehensive Patient Data Decreases Time to Therapy and Increases Medication Adherence
Surescripts has simplified the specialty prescribing and fulfillment process to help specialty pharmacies and physician practices realize decreased phone calls, increased dispense rates and improvements in time to therapy. Now, Surescripts is expanding its clinical intelligence capabilities by partnering with Diameter Health to provide timely, easily accessible and accurate patient data for specialty pharmacies.
“Surescripts is focused on reducing the time it takes to get patients needing specialty medications onto their therapy,” explained Mike Pritts, Chief Product Officer at Surescripts. “As we innovate in this area, we are excited to partner with Diameter Health to deliver enhanced clinical intelligence for specialty pharmacies. By providing fast and easy access to simple-to-understand, normalized, patient-centric clinical data, we can help providers avoid the back-and-forth phone calls and faxes that slow the approval of specialty therapies and ultimately delay treatments.”
Surescripts Specialty Medications Gateway automates the way clinical information is gathered and delivered to specialty pharmacies of all sizes, expediting otherwise complex and time-consuming enrollment processes, in accordance with agreed-upon use cases of the Carequality interoperability framework. The Surescripts partnership with Diameter Health will accelerate the ability to incorporate powerful clinical intelligence into the process by providing standardized data that readily communicates comprehensive patient histories.
“By generating a high quality, interoperable data asset from multi-source electronic health records and making it available within Surescripts Specialty Medications Gateway, we can reduce time to therapy and free up specialty pharmacists and prescribers to spend more time on patient care,” said Dr. Paulo Pinho, Vice President and Medical Director of Innovation at Diameter Health. “This important partnership will help overcome existing challenges by delivering missing or incomplete patient data and providing it in a way that is actionable for specialty pharmacists, so they can get patients started on therapy faster.”
Specialty Medications Gateway compliments Surescripts Specialty Patient Enrollment which is used by prescribers to automate the specialty enrollment process with patient data sent directly from the electronic health record (EHR) to the specialty pharmacy or hub.
Recent findings show the value of Specialty Medications Gateway and Specialty Patient Enrollment for both specialty pharmacies and physician practices. With the use of Specialty Medications Gateway, Accredo specialty pharmacy decreased the average time to fill a specialty prescription by approximately two days. Additionally, phone calls to prescribers for missing clinical data decreased by nearly half. Further, three physician practices using Specialty Patient Enrollment saved roughly one to two hours per week on related administrative tasks involving phone calls, faxes and paperwork.
“We all want the same thing: clear communication of the patient history that helps get patients started on therapy in a safe and timely manner,” said Katie Reeves, Senior Product Manager at Accredo. “Together with Surescripts, we’re doing just that. Clear communication ultimately improves adherence and leads to better patient outcomes.”
In the wake of extensive innovation in drug development and the continued rise in chronic conditions, specialty medications now account for roughly half of medicine spending in the U.S. In addition to the cost burden, specialty medications require extra care and expertise, and half of pharmacists say the average specialty prescription takes at least four days and up to 10 days to fill from the time it’s received.
