As the healthcare industry continues to evolve, the name of the game is value. All stakeholders – as well as the public in general – are turning a discerning eye to the quality of care. This goes for public and private sectors: consumers, who are savvier than ever in managing their own health, as well as payers, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), and manufacturers, who scrutinize the added criteria of costs and performance while making sure their partners are meeting contractual obligations.

To stay competitive in the market, specialty pharmacies and hospital systems have a critical need to be transparent and to consistently prove positive outcomes to every party they serve and collaborate with.

Let’s examine some key strategies, from systematizing internal operations to delivering reports with statistically significant real-world evidence.

Collecting, Tracking, and Analyzing the Right Metrics

Data is the driving force in maintaining transparency and demonstrating outcomes. Fortunately, in today’s transforming digital environment, data is more and more accessible. But many specialty pharmacies struggle with collecting the right data and successfully translating it into a reliable gauge of value.

Organizations often struggle with issues like necessary costs and resources, a lack of reliability and accuracy in collecting and interpreting data, and ambiguity in which metrics provide value for each unique payer and manufacturer.

To optimize the process, specialty pharmacies should build a strategy by asking questions to their internal teams and stakeholders, like:

• Which types of outcomes should be assessed?
• How will they be measured?
• Which therapies require customization, and to what extent?
• How strictly should measures be tied to the models of reimbursement?
• Who will take responsibility for collecting and reporting?
• What constitutes a positive therapy response?

Outcomes measures may include considerations like:

• Time to therapy
• Converting scripts to filled prescriptions
• Time to fill prescriptions
• Duration of patient’s therapy
• Persistency on therapy
• Patient outreach capabilities
• Access to payer networks
• The specialty pharmacy’s core offerings

Building a Patient-Centric Infrastructure

In order to truly succeed with transparency and the ability to consistently prove meaningful outcomes, organizations must start from the inside out. And, at the center should be each patient – regardless of whether the conversation revolves around individualized care, population health, or business initiatives.

With core systems, protocols, and tools in place to cater to the patient's experience, the process becomes proactive rather than reactive. Pharmacies can systematize results, creating a positive feedback loop throughout all aspects of the business.

A patient-centric infrastructure starts from the first patient touchpoint and continues throughout the care continuum. Even when the patient has completed or discontinued therapy, the most transparent and successful pharmacies strive to maintain communication and collect long-term follow-up data to build more robust and informed care plans.

Technology Is Critical in Data Exchange

A specialty pharmacy’s technology partners and capabilities have a make-or-break role. It’s critical to have systems in place to automatically capture the necessary data while helping to analyze, organize, and export it in a digestible format.

CPS understands that this undertaking is no small feat. In an effort to better serve its specialty pharmacy customers, we’ve developed and honed a triage of services to reflect our mission statement: to help specialty pharmacy stakeholders build, elevate, and prove their value.

CPS helps specialty pharmacy stakeholders tackle this undertaking through technology, strategic insights, and highly-targeted outcomes research modeling.

Contact us today to learn more about how your specialty pharmacy can thrive with the help of CPS.