Services Provide Opportunities for Pharmacy Professionals

Pharmacy Times’ Ed Cohen, PharmD, FAPha, interviews Miranda Rochol, Healthcare Product Management & Strategy Executive for IQVIA, about opportunities for pharmacy professionals utilizing the company’s services.

Transcript

Ed Cohen: Can you review some of the successes and opportunities that pharmacists and technicians have had using IQVIA services?

Miranda: Rochol: Yes, absolutely. We actually published a white paper twice a year that looks at all of our products that have been implemented in the pharmacies and identifies which validations have triggered. For example, how many prescriptions have been identified as being filled for a prescriber that has an OIG exclusion against them. Each OIG exclusion, if the pharmacy were to be fined, is approximately $10,000. If a prescriber were to write a prescription, and they were on the OIG list, and the dispensed that, and the OIG caught them, then they would get that fine for however many prescriptions the doctor dispensed out of that pharmacy.

In approximately 6 months of time, for our pharmacy customers, there was 12,383 prescriptions that we caught. If we extrapolate that out, that’s almost $12.3 million that we hopefully prevented them from being fined or audited on. It ultimately is the pharmacy’s decision whether or not they want to follow our guidance on that. It’s their operational guidance that they implement, versus our direction that they implement. So, we suggest that they do not fill that prescription if the doctor prescriber is on the OIG list.

Another example, especially with the opioid epidemic that we have right now, are all of the DEA alerts that we do. We want to make sure that the DEA is active, that it’s in good standing. We want to make sure that the DEA drug schedule that the doctor’s license allows for is also the same DEA drug schedule of the NDC that they’re writing for. So, across all of those types of DEA potential finds that could be hit, there were over 434,000 prescriptions over a 6 month period potentially that could’ve been a violation of a DEA regulation that is out there. That’s about $10.9 billion that we potentially helped to save in a fine or audit avoidance.

In addition to those actual prescription transactions that we’re trying to help them to dispense safely, we also help to look at the pharmacists’ and the technicians’ licensure behind the pharmacy counter. We actually worked with a pharmacy recently to do a test, and they sent us a file of about 200 or so pharmacists. Sixty percent of them we found that should not be behind the counter. So, we asked them if they sent us a garbage file. Did they try to test us? Did they give us bad data so that we could tell them it was bad data? They said, ‘no, we didn’t.’ So, it’s really important to make sure your employees are also licensed. Otherwise, the government can call back that revenue, as well, or that prescription sale, as well. We try to work with everybody to make sure that we’re helping them from an ROI perspective, and to keep them safe from those fines and audits.

In conclusion, IQVIA has been in the pharmacy industry since 1954, and we are continuously trying to protect pharmacies from those fines and audits around prescribers. Pharmacies must do their part to verify the prescriptive authority of prescribers. And they must perform those routine audits to make sure that those prescriptions are actually able to be dispensed. IQVIA solution are able to help proactively identify potential prescriptions that could put the pharmacy at risk of a find or audit and also help to monitor the staff to make sure that the staff is able to dispense those prescriptions.