Specialty Pharmacists: Evolving from Dispensing Medications to Serving as Data-Informed Partners

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 do you envision the role of specialty pharmacists evolving from dispensing medications to serving as data-informed partners in patient management?
Haley Burgess: Yeah, I think Specialty Pharmacy and the pharmacists engaged in that work, they're going to evolve into what we've desired all along, which is precision medicine, if we can take the pharmacogenomic, pharmacokinetic that type of data and information and consider what is the disease state, what is the profile of the clinical data of this person? And understand what are their goals? What are their life goals, and which medications fit that for them. What an amazing space for pharmacists to be in, to actually see the talk of precision medicine coming into reality. And again, I think it is the automation, the data, natural language processing, artificial intelligence. It's the ability to take the solutions and the technology that we have today and turn it into the ability to make such smart decisions on the front end, or pivot quickly when we need to if someone's not responding or it's not the right therapy for them, or a new therapy has come out, or, wow, there's a new research trial of something that's life saving, that's gone open label. How do pharmacists have that information at their fingertips to know when to pivot and when they can enroll into clinical trials, or when the drug's not working, I think all of that will continue to evolve, and those are the types of things that a novel on is testing and using today in the technology. We also have a clinical research patient finder to. Tool where we can program with the data in real time, inclusion and exclusion criteria for clinical trials so that patients are enrolled in the right trials at the right time, because so many trials really never make it to fruition simply because patients don't know about it, we're not enrolling at the right time and precision care in that space of doing what's right for the patient is on the horizon.