Week 2 – R X S T E W A R D S H I P
Moving Toward Strategic Rx Stewardship
Northwind Pharmaceuticals is headquartered in Indianapolis and along with our fellow Hoosiers, we are thrilled to host the 2021 NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Tournament. As the tournament progresses over the next three weeks, there will be a lot of talk about strategy and specifically X’s and O’s – the representation of choreographed movement between teammates to accomplish a goal that individuals could not achieve on their own.
While we certainly enjoy discussing the intricacies of basketball, when we think of strategic planning and X’s and O’s, we tend to think about employer on-site and near-site health centers and the opportunity to use those as a nexus of care to benefit self-funded employers and their insured membership. Employer-sponsored health centers can be a lever to drive improved outcomes through implementation and integration of targeted programs. As part of our 14-week series on Strategic Rx Stewardship™, this blog post will explore the concept of the nexus of care and its impact.
Merriam-Webster provides a short list of definitions for nexus including: ‘casual link’, ‘center’ and, our favorite, ‘connected group’. Using a health center as a nexus of care, a place where purposeful connections are made between patients, care providers and pharmacy services, can be a powerful tool in achieving integrated health and improved outcomes. At Northwind, we strive to provide insight, influence and impact as our contribution to this nexus of care model.
INSIGHT
Leveraging dynamic pharmacy analytics tools and expert guidance, we provide visibility, understanding and direction for employers and their health center partners. Detailed information about pharmacy spending, ‘high risk’ patients, formulary efficiency opportunities and medication adherence patterns can all be utilized to maximize the outreach efforts of health center providers. Imagine the efficiency employers gain by moving away from using a non-specific, blanket-type approach to member engagement with the hope of reaching the correct members in favor of utilizing specifically targeted programs and communication strategies crafted with insights gained through pharmacist-reviewed analytics.
INFLUENCE
Empowering an employer’s membership with facilitated access to medications, home testing, supplies and education assists the employer in gaining greater influence over pharmacy costs and health outcomes. Last week’s blog provided an overview of our Rx@Work, Rx@Home and RxAdministration products, including Clinical Blueprints. These programs can be utilized as part of a coordinated effort to give health center medical providers additional tools they can implement to engage patients. Clinical Blueprints, in particular, are a perfect way to deliver on a nexus of care philosophy as they provide health center staff and ancillary care providers with a complete toolkit of resources to assist with outreach, disease education, self-monitoring tools, chronic care medications and monitoring parameters for quality improvement efforts.
IMPACT
At Northwind, our approach to creating improvement is built upon three pillars:
- Engage – We engage the employer, the health center and the patient in the Strategic Rx Stewardship™ process.
- Enhance – We enhance employer and health center partners’ ability to leverage pharmacy spend to deliver better health outcomes.
- Empower – We empower the employer, the health center and the patient with the guidance and tools necessary to provide value to each stakeholder.
This work is documented on customized dashboards that capture the outcomes of a variety of employer and health center guided metrics, as well as, those derived from medical standards of care and published HEDIS measures. For us, the true measure of impact is determined by whether we have facilitated converting an employer’s Rx spend into an Rx investment that returns value through improvement in cost containment and clinical outcomes.
Employer-sponsored health centers are perfectly positioned to be a nexus of care that delivers impactful and measurable outcomes through strategically targeted medical and pharmaceutical interventions. If you would like to learn more about the X’s and O’s of the Strategic Rx Stewardship™ playbook and how we can win together, please contact us. Let’s have a conversation!
