What is Prescribe Wellness?
Prescribe Wellness is a cloud-based software platform community pharmacies use to track Medicare 5-star rating measures, review performance metrics, and sort data at the pharmacy-patient level. It offers innovative technological solutions designed to make it easier for pharmacies to improve patient adherence, build customer loyalty and provide clinical services via the appointment-based model.
I first became aware of Prescribe Wellness when Mirixa published a press release announcing their partnership with the company.
In my home state of Arkansas, I work with a lot of different independently owned community pharmacies, so it didn’t take long until I ran across a company that was using it.
Greta Ishmael, PharmD owner and pharmacist in charge of Econo-Med pharmacy in Cherokee Village, Arkansas says, “Prescribe Wellness gives us a chance to check in with our patients and make sure they are getting the medications they need. It also allows us to target those patients that are frequently missing refills for our MedSync program. I also use it to track STAR ratings data.”
How does it work?
PrescribeWellness interfaces with over 50 pharmacy management systems and scrubs their pharmacy’s prescription claims data to identify real-time patient engagement opportunities and help the pharmacist and pharmacy staff manage patient clinical services. The platform provides a snapshot of adherence ratings for the pharmacy’s patients, which can be also be sorted at the Medicare plan level.
Adherence is an important component for Medicare 5-star measures, as 3 of the 4 pharmacy quality measures for Medicare star ratings track patient adherence and are triple rated. PrescribeWellness advertises its system as improving medication adherence, increasing customer awareness, increasing patient engagement, and reducing medications returned to stock.
“There are some functions of the platforms we don’t use,” says Ishmael. “We won’t send the automated calls because one of the reasons my patients choose us as their pharmacy is because we talk to them and answer the phone when they call. One of my technicians calls each patient and talks with them about refilling the missed medications. It’s a great program and I would recommend it.”
Some pharmacies, like Ishmael’s, have the capacity to make personal phone calls to their patients every day, on a consistent basis. Others do not. PrescribeWellness offers the pharmacist the flexibility to customize the patient engagement tools to meet their pharmacy’s needs. Thousands of PrescribeWellness pharmacies do use the digital communications because it creates high touch relationship with their patients without the added burden to the pharmacy staff. PrescribeWellness creates simple, patient centric campaign message that the local pharmacist records in their own voice. The calls are automated on the back-end by PrescribeWellness on behalf of the pharmacy through algorithms which trigger clinical refill reminders, happy birthday messages, and welcome to our pharmacy calls, among others. These digital communications drive the pharmacist-patient relationships and customer loyalty and patient outcomes.
What information can it provide?
PrescribeWellness is a platform that you can customize to your pharmacy and your patients’ needs. The foundation of PrescribeWellness’ platform is called their Patient Engagement Center (PEC). The PEC provides pharmacies with key performance indicators, both on prescription data, but patient disease state, top physicians and most importantly, patient’s daily Star ratings. They also include the display measure, statin use in diabetic patients.
They have multiple modules available for pharmacies and are continually adding more. At present (November 2016) they have the following:
- Module on patient automated digital communications
- Medication Synchronization module
- Medicare enrollment module
- Vaccine completion module
There is also an online platform to help with training and resources called PrescribeWellness University where you can learn the skills needed to take full advantage of PrescribeWellness products. It contains video courses, toolkits, monthly podcasts and marketing kits aimed at improving pharmacy efficiency, patient engagement, and medication adherence.
How much does it cost?
As far as member pricing goes, there are a few options. A pharmacy can choose their modules “a la carte”, paying a base price per module. Or they can purchase a combination of modules in a bundled package deal. Purchasing options may also be available through your pharmacy’s PSAO or GPO or wholesaler.
If you are interested in learning more, check out their website at PrescribeWellness.com or call them directly at 800-960-8147.
This new blog series will focus on tools that help community pharmacy implement and integrate enhanced patient services.
The new series is called the Community Pharmacy Toolkit…
Some of these tools focus on streamlining workflow, integrating new services, improving interoperability, making for easier documentation or even just some services that I think are really cool.
If you’d like to stay up to date and be notified of each new article in this series, join the Pharmapreneur Community Newsletter.
