Reshaping Complex Therapy Delivery

Haley Burgess, SVP of provider surveillance and safety at Inovalon, discussed the operational challenges in specialty pharmacies, including high costs, complex prior authorization processes, and medication adherence issues. Burgess highlighted the role of Inovalon’s platforms, Script Med and Vigilance, in streamlining workflows, improving patient care, and enhancing pharmacist productivity by 50%. Burgess emphasized the importance of data integration, AI-driven tools, and precision medicine in evolving the role of specialty pharmacists. A transcript of her conversation with Pharmaceutical Executive can be found below.

Pharmaceutical Executive: How are challenges reshaping the way pharmacies deliver complex therapies?
Haley Burgess: The data is a big challenge. Access is a big challenge, and then you think about price transparency across policy, and that's a big problem as well. It's getting better, perhaps, but the cost to the patient on the other side is great. The other piece is medication adherence. So how do you predict or understand if the patient's actually going to take the medication, and how do you plan for a proper way to intervene so understanding that person and what are their challenges? Are there social determinants of health that are problems? Is it transportation? Is it understanding the directions for the medication or how to inject them? So there are lots of points throughout the Specialty Pharmacy medication management process, like it's super complex, and we're learning as fast as we can. And and I think that is where a novel on comes in. Our products are built specifically to collect all of this rich information from disparate systems. So with script med in particular. You know, this is a really nice end to end platform from ordering to the transcribing to the processing and dispensing of medications, also inventory control for the specialty pharmacy. How much do I have an inventory? Can I get this out in the next few days so that we don't stall therapy all the way through to the monitoring? So again, if you think about Inovalon we have this robust data set. We're one of the largest aggregators of data, and if you're able to pull in their medication histories, understand their adherence, predict that, and support the patient really well from the very beginning all the way through to monitoring them. What adverse events are they having? Are they responding to the medication? Are they taking the medication and are they experiencing any side effects or issues that we need to help them relate back to their collaborative physician team.