Pharmacy Voices

It seems that you can’t go a day without seeing or hearing something about the opioid epidemic, whether in trade publications or mainstream media. Now that everyone is paying attention to it, what happens? While we wait for Congress, or maybe, instead of waiting for them, there are steps that the healthcare industry can take today.

The healthcare space continues to evolve, partially in response to the increasingly numerous and glaring shortfalls patients experience in terms of poor outcomes. Possibly an even greater driver to the changes you are experiencing in your practice is the continually rising cost of care. A single healthcare dollar can be divided into an array of expense areas, including inpatient hospital stays, nursing home and home healthcare costs, administrative fees, and physician and clinic services. Did we forget medications?

We will review the types of performance networks and the different strategies employed to drive measurements designed to improve patient outcomes.

Thoughts on the pharmacy provider network's importance in care and the risks to access created by current PBM tactics.

In this interview, Dave Johnson, vice president at Kirby Lester and a 15-year veteran of the community pharmacy industry, talks about one thing that he still doesn’t understand. Why would a pharmacy ever be okay with losing money, when easy, affordable technology could prevent it?

We hear a lot these days about big data and how this is transforming the high-tech industry. Healthcare is one of the markets targeted by cloud platforms and big data, and the trends are gaining traction.

DIR are nothing more than a rip-off of pharmacies by the PBMs, a number of HIEs are on shaky ground financially, and just the latest on CMS HITECH onboarding of noneligible providers such as pharmacies for Medicaid programs.

Pharmacies are now competing on so many fronts — to be in payer networks, to offer additional services, to achieve high-quality metrics to retain patients — it is a challenge to evaluate all of the options and determine the best approach to be successful.

Bill just returned from a health benefit managers’ business coalition meeting where national leaders were telling attendees that employers need to control healthcare costs going forward.