Surescripts EHR Integration to Up Care Coordination, Specialty Meds

Biopharma company UBC has partnered with Surescripts to leverage the vendor’s Specialty Patient Enrollment EHR integration for streamlined care coordination. 

The EHR integration, which is set to be piloted in the second half of 2021, will give providers across UBC’s biopharma support services access to more accurate patient health data.

With more up-to-date patient data exchange, providers will be able to deliver more coordinated care, leading to faster prescription fill times for patients.

“UBC’s integration with Surescripts’ broad network of electronic health record systems, will allow UBC to offer more prescribers with a simple, in-workflow enrollment that ultimately improves outcomes for the patients under their care,” Ron Lacy, UBC’s VP of Global Product and Innovation, said in a public statement.

“We value the Surescripts network position and their ability to bring a wide range of EHR systems that UBC will connect with - currently over 29 platforms, including many of the leading systems,” Lacy continued.

The service will also allow healthcare providers to initiate risk evaluation and mitigation strategies (REMS) enrollment processes, clinical studies and registries, and patient support services, all without having to leave their native EHR workflow.

“UBC is looking forward to piloting this integration with Surescripts in the second half of 2021,” Lacy said. “Together, we can improve patient enrollment rates to all the key services including patient support, initiating REMS enrollment, and late stage registries.”

Andrew Mellin, MD, Surescripts vice president and chief medical information officer, noted that the service’s care coordination functionalities allows providers to speed up the pace of patient’s specialty medication journey.

“Specialty Patient Enrollment will empower prescribers that utilize services from UBC and greatly improve efficiency with accurate and complete enrollment data by automating the current manual specialty prescribing process that is dependent upon lengthy paper forms, as well as faxes and phone calls,” Mellin said.

WellSpan Health, a Pennsylvania health system, was able to improve patient safety and cut costs through a similar EHR integration that boosted access to patient medication histories.

Prior to the integration, patient records from external medication history sources were often incomplete, inconsistent, or missing at WellSpan, Robert Lackey, MD, FAAFP, CMIO told EHRIntelligence.com in an interview earlier this month.

This required a convoluted medication transcription process; employees had to reach out to pharmacists and other providers to gather medication data and then manually enter it into the EHR, presenting the opportunity for transcription errors and potential adverse drug events (ADEs), Lackey explained.

At the end of last year, WellSpan integrated MedHx, a health IT tool developed by DrFirst that provides a comprehensive medication database comprised of local and national medication history sources, including HIEs and EHR partners, directly in the native Epic workflow.

The technology also identifies and connects local pharmacies and healthcare organizations that share mutual patients, making the dispensed fills available within the EHR and allowing for more comprehensive patient medication records.

Lackey said that the health system plans to continue improving patient safety by applying the same type of logic to medication refill requests to make the renewal process less labor-intensive and more efficient.