Surescripts Specialty Medications Solutions to transform process for prescriptions, savings

Surescripts shared that more prescribers and specialty pharmacists nationwide are adopting Surescripts Specialty Medications Solutions to transform the manual process used to prescribe specialty medications, saving time and money for patients and providers.

To support this contention, Surescripts provided the following results:

• In May 2022, prescribers used Real-Time Prescription Benefit to save patients an average of $534.74 per specialty prescription;
• In May 2022, the number of prescribers enabled for Specialty Patient Enrollment was 24% higher than in May 2021;
• The number of Specialty Medications Gateway transactions was 421% higher in the first five months of 2022 compared to the same time period in 2021;
• As of May 2022, specialty pharmacists can use Specialty Medications Gateway to access patient information supplied by more than 200,000 prescribers nationwide;
• Surescripts processed 8.2 million electronic prescriptions for specialty medications between January and May 2022—an 8% increase over the same time period in 2021;
• From January to May 2022, Surescripts delivered 85% more real-time benefit checks for specialty prescriptions compared to the same time period in 2021. 

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“Eliminating the time-consuming and manual process of prescribing specialty medications and simplifying the delivery of patient information removes delays that threaten medication adherence,” said Frank Harvey, CEO of Surescripts. “It also means healthcare professionals can spend less time on paperwork and more time focused on what matters most: patients’ health.”

In January 2022, Accredo specialty pharmacy implemented automation enhancements with Specialty Medications Gateway to obtain current information for a patient’s weight for use in weight-based dosing. In just two months, Accredo reported that 60% of the time the automated workflow delivered the most recent weight for the patient, creating efficiencies and reducing manual outreach. Accredo also noted that 11% of the updated weight information was of clinical significance (+/- 10% weight change) and created an opportunity for a pharmacist to review and take action to ensure patient safety through accurate dosing.

“In caring for patients with complex diagnoses, specialty pharmacists must work with efficiency and quality,” said Katie Reeves, senior product manager at Accredo.

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“Surescripts solutions accelerate the process for specialty prescribing, fulfillment and onboarding by filling information gaps with clinical intelligence. Speed and patient safety are enhanced because clean, critical clinical data is automatically delivered from the EHR with the prescription,” she said.

As of May, Accredo is reviewing more than 12,000 specialty prescriptions each month that are informed by patient clinical data that is automatically pulled directly from the electronic health record. As a result, Accredo specialty pharmacists are streamlining the inefficient manual process of enrolling patients for specialty medications and ultimately delivering improved turnaround time and patient safety.

Specialty drugs account for the largest proportion of new medicines launched in the past five years, and retail prices for widely used specialty drugs increased at more than three times the rate of general inflation in 2020, Surescripts noted.