How Can Specialty Pharmacies Continue the Push Towards Value-Based Reimbursement?

“The TeleHealth for me is very exciting for specialty pharmacy to start to utilize within a lot of our service offering, because if you think about it, patients spend a short amount of time in inpatient settings, and then they spend the vast majority of their time in outpatient settings, which we often times become that primary care coordinator. What we have found is in our specific disease states, hemophilia being one of them, or even primary immune deficiency, a lot of times patients kind of fall in this gap of care.

We feel like TeleHealth, since it’s an established technology, organization like Avizia, that’s a platform in which we’ve recently partnered with, HB Now(?), our new virtual platform for nursing and pharmacy, allows patients to be able to ping us at 2 in the morning, and actually allows our clinical team to be able to evaluate, ‘hey, let’s actually see this issue versus hear about it on the telephone,’ and some of those results are captured in our patient experience metrics, that show that patients actually feel like it was a better encounter than a cold telephone call, and so I think those are things that are available, not just for us at a specialty pharmacy at Heritage Biologics, but for all of our counterparts as well, and I think as you look at TeleHealth growing in the future, it can become a platform for us to better compete. I know myself, as a consumer in the market place, would like to evaluate multiple pharmacies that offer similar benefits, like TeleHealth, and I think that you’ll see that growth continue.”