Surescripts Takes Aim at Interoperability in Specialty Prescribing

Surescripts has announced a partnership with Diameter Health that aims to enhance interoperability for streamlined specialty prescribing and decreased clinician burden.

The partnership is expected to provide specialty pharmacies with timely, accurate patient data to support the specialty prescribing and fulfillment process.

Greater interoperability of patient health data should help decrease phone calls between specialty pharmacies and physician practices. This is expected to decrease clinician burden, while also increasing dispense rates and speeding up care delivery.

"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,” Pritts continued.

Surescripts Specialty Medications Gateway automates data sharing with specialty pharmacies in accordance with agreed-upon use cases of the Carequality interoperability framework.

"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 Paulo Pinho, MD, 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,” Pinho added.

Specialty Medications Gateway will complement Surescripts Specialty Patient Enrollment tool, which automates specialty enrollment by sending patient data directly from the EHR to the specialty pharmacy or hub.

Recent findings show the value of these tools for specialty pharmacies and physician practices. Accredo specialty pharmacy decreased the average time to fill a specialty prescription by approximately two days with the use of Specialty Medications Gateway. Phone calls to prescribers for missing clinical data also decreased by nearly half.

Additionally, three physician practices using Specialty Patient Enrollment saved between roughly one and two hours per week on administrative tasks such as 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."