Last September, Excelera announced its innovative process for assessing medication adherence across its nationwide network of health system specialty pharmacies. The data was presented as a poster at the ASHP Summer Meetings and Exhibition. This September, Excelera will present a poster at the NASP Annual Meeting which shows how Banner Health, an Excelera Network member, used the network adherence dashboard to identify a quality initiative to enhance adherence at their specialty pharmacy.
The objective of the quality initiative was for reviewer specialty pharmacists to understand adherence via proportion of days covered (PDC) rates, and to implement a quality improvement initiative to improve adherence in two disease states: oncology and transplant. PDC is the primary method used to calculate medication adherence at the population level.
The methodology included a review of clinical pharmacist workflow and documentation around interventions in the oncology and transplant population to assess potential effects on adherence for the year 2018. The results of investigation found that standardized workflows, systematic and consistent documentation practices around interventions, and ongoing education focusing on adherence was needed. Thus, a quality initiative program was implemented in 2019 to address these identified opportunities.
After implementation of the quality initiative, there was an increase in the systematic documentation of interventions related to adherence factors. The percentage of clinical interventions associated with improving PDC in both oncology and transplant were mostly due to outcomes such as potentially improved therapy adherence and resolved side effect challenges. The authors concluded that a systematic process for reporting adherence led to a quality initiative that improved the understanding of prescribing practices, clinical pharmacist intervention documentation, development of a strategic side effect management process, education and improved PDC reporting.
Excelera Network members leverage adherence dashboards to assess medication adherence in patients with complex disease states, identify and forestall potential causes for non-adherence through pharmacist intervention, and demonstrate improvement toward adherence goals. In addition, members can establish adherence at the health system level as well as benchmark against other specialty pharmacies within a disease state.
Excelera’s proprietary data platform is designed to collect and aggregate complex pharmacy patient data from many different source systems, including longitudinal medical, pharmacy, and patient journey data. By using the platform, member health systems can assess the quality of their specialty pharmacy programs and compare them to the Excelera Network’s average and the available published data.
More information: this research abstract was published in the Journal of Drug Assessment, an official journal of NASP, as part of the 2020 National Association of Specialty Pharmacy Annual Meeting & Expo. Our Abstract Poster No. 7: “Utilization of a network adherence dashboard and subsequent quality initiative to enhance adherence”, was one of only 33 abstracts that were accepted for presentation.
