The Role of Specialty Pharmacy in Delivering Quality Cancer Care

Matt Farber, MA, Senior Director of Patient Care and Advocacy at Walgreens, talks about the growing role of specialty pharmacies in delivering cancer care.

Transcript

The role for specialty pharmacies in delivering quality cancer care for patients is a really significant one. The number of oral therapies that have been approved over the last 5 years is significant. And what that means is now about a third of cancer care is delivered outside of the hospital or the cancer center via oral medication. So that means that in many cases the pharmacist might be the last person to talk to a patient before they start their treatment. So, given that, it really is vital that the pharmacist is seen as a team member, an extension of the care team. Since there are a significant number of specialty pharmacies out there, that means that the role of them continues to grow. So what you’re going to continue to see is as there are more oral therapies being approved, there is hundreds of them in the pipeline today, plus the number of cancer patients continuing to do well on their therapy. It means the role for specialty pharmacies will just continue to grow.