Written By: Denise Taylor, MSN
As patients’ primary contacts on the care team, nurses and practice staff are key to helping patients to access the therapies they need.1 This includes helping patients navigate numerous challenges in the areas of prescription access and affordability—challenges that are further exacerbated when dealing with specialty medications.
Specialty medications make up less than 3% of all prescriptions in the United States, but they still account for more than 50% of the nation’s drug spending.2-5 Experts estimate that specialty medications total about 75% of the approximately 7,000 prescription drugs currently in development. By 2022, it’s predicted that more than 60% of the 600 drugs expected to receive approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will be specialty medications.5
Specialty medications tend to be more scientifically complex than other prescriptions, often going beyond merely treating a disease’s symptoms to treat its underlying cause.6 They are frequently expensive, require special handling, and their use may require additional monitoring. Consequently, they are normally distributed by specialized pharmacies.7-9
Patients often must wait weeks to get their prescribed specialty medication.1,9 Facilitating the prescription may require the physician to fill out a variety of different forms, then access online portals for multiple different stakeholders. The entire process can take weeks, placing an intense administrative burden on both clinical and non-clinical practice staff, who must spend time every week on back-and-forth calls and faxes, chasing down signatures, and providing other manual support required to see specialty prescriptions through to fulfillment.9
Now, technology solutions are available to support the care team as they advocate for their patients’ specialty medication needs.
Specialty medications are impacting today’s medical practices:10
Nurses are trusted providers who spend the most time with patients. As such, their time is precious. Many nurses devote a significant amount of time staying informed of the details of their patients’ prescription medications, including:
Nurses’ commitment to providing fully informed prescribing ensures that care teams have ready access to the information they need to inform optimal prescribing decisions, decisions that are based on the individual patients’ health, financial, and coverage circumstances.
However, the complex administrative processes associated with specialty medications detract from valuable face-to-face interaction time between nurses and their patients.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic complicated provider-patient relationships, the amount of time required by nurses to navigate patient insurance benefits and prescription drug benefits was already a source of dissatisfaction for nurses and other practice staff. Given their critical role in point-of-prescribing interactions, no nurse should feel they’ve become an “administrative assistant,” as one described the experience.
Fortunately, today’s technology provides a way to support patient advocacy in the area of specialty medications by supporting the healthcare team and simplifying their responsibilities.
Veradigm’s AccelRx™ is a unique software solution for managing specialty medications. It provides technology to streamline the specialty medication fulfillment process. It does so by automating and simplifying the complex series of steps required to fill a specialty medication.1,11,12 This reduces patient wait times. It also substantially reduces the administrative burden on nurses, healthcare providers, and practice staff.7,11,12
Veradigm leverages broad industry relationships to combine electronic enrollment, consent, and prescriptions into a single software platform that delivers faster time-to-fulfillment for all specialty drugs, with all payers.12 AccelRx’s single, user-friendly platform can transform your practice’s specialty medication management:1,7,9,12
These features allow healthcare providers to deliver specialty medications to their patients more quickly and easily.7,9,12 Faster time-to-therapy delivers better odds for medication adherence and for positive outcomes for your patients. It also decreases the number of phone calls and faxes required for nurses and practice staff.12
AccelRx supports nurses by making the specialty medication fulfillment process more efficient, thereby freeing up time to spend on patient care. The additional time spent focusing on patients can help improve their health outcomes. To learn more about how AccelRx can help the care team at your medical practice support your patients’ specialty medication needs, contact us.
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