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By Pooja Babbrah, Practice Lead, PBM Services
Specialty medications are changing health care, providing life-saving treatment options for patients with rare and chronic conditions. Patients, however, often face big hurdles in obtaining specialty medications, creating inefficiencies that delay start to therapy or force patients/doctors to abandon first-line therapies.
The good news is that healthcare industry standards are being enhanced to bring specialty pharmacy into the digital world by both NCPDP and HL7. These improvements will dramatically reduce provider burden and the path from prescribe to dispense.
On the NCPDP front, the new Specialty Pharmacy Work Group (that I co-chair) is working to identify pain points and transactions that delay the prescribing, enrollment, dispensing, care management, reporting and payment of specialty medications. Three focus areas that have momentum are:
In a future blog, we will look at specialty prescribing pain points that will be addressed by HL7 FHIR. In the meantime, if your organization needs help understanding the impact of emerging standards or use cases that will impact specialty pharmacy and your provider workflows or want to know more about NCPDP’s Specialty Pharmacy Workgroup, reach out to me, Pooja Babbrah, at pooja.babbrah@pocp.com.