THERE WAS AN INTERESTING ARTICLE IN THE REVIEW section of The Wall Street Journal (Aug. 13–14) about chronopharmacology. The article was titled “Taking Medication by the Clock.”
Chronopharmacology
The focus was on drugs meant to avert heart attacks and strokes. These drugs should be taken when they are most effective. With strokes the findings of 31 studies based on 11,816 stroke patients found that there was a 49% increase in the chance of a stroke between 6 a.m. and noon. This is considered the “risk window.”
There were similar results from a study on heart attacks. The article pointed out that antihypertensives taken before bedtime are more effective in regulating blood pressure levels to reduce strokes and heart attacks. The same applies to aspirin. Apparently, a sharp rise in blood pressure occurs between 6 a.m. and noon. If you are interested in the details behind these findings, I suggest reading the article.
Pharmacy Improving Outcomes
The reason I bring this up is that pharmacy has become far more active in recent years in helping people manage their medications to improve outcomes. This has led to the use of medication adherence packaging, which organizes the medications to help people remember when to take the drugs. Also, medication synchronization, which many pharmacies now offer, is a way to ensure that a person always has the correct prescribed drugs on hand. The pharmacy benefits from higher refill rates, and the patient benefits from, ideally, better outcomes.
Now, you may be asking, how does this all tie to technology? First, medication adherence packing is driven by special software that interfaces with the pharmacy management system. As for medication synchronization, with software designed to mine the data in a pharmacy management system, this facilitates identifying those individuals who can benefit from med sync. It also gives pharmacists a reason to work with the person’s physician to get the prescriptions lined up to be refilled on the same date.
As pharmacy moves beyond just dispensing prescriptions in the services it provides, the value of the pharmacist increases. And pharmacy system vendors are helping here. The interview with Jude Dieterman, CEO of Transaction Data Systems, in this issue is a good case in point. This company is making a big push in getting clinical services recognized and reimbursed.
The Community Pharmacy Enhanced Services Network (CPESN) is another example. Fortunately, the technology vendors have gotten behind this initiative by providing software to support electronic care plans. You can read more about CPESN in Marsha Millonig’s column in this issue (“Catalyst Corner”).
What I see is that pharmacy is picking up tailwinds to help gain new sources of revenue to offset reliance on dispensing prescriptions, the reimbursement for which has been sliced by the pharmacy benefit managers. CT