On July 25, MedCity News briefly reported on four new clinical affiliations for CVS Health. A few days later, the rapidly evolving company announced that it was contracting with IBM to apply Watson predictive analytics for customers of CVS’ pharmacies, MinuteClinic locations and pharmacy benefit manager Caremark.
But CVS wasn’t done. Late last week, the Woonsocket, R.I.-based chain announced that it had added another health system to its list of collaborative partners, namely St. Luke’s University Health Network, based in Bethlehem, Pa. CVS pharmacies and MinuteClinics are integrating their electronic health records with those at St. Luke’s in order to improve care coordination, the two entities said.
“It’s really just advanced care coordination that will result in better care for our patients,” said Ray Midlam, vice president of planning and business development for six-hospital St. Luke’s, which serves eastern Pennsylvania and small parts of New Jersey.
St. Luke’s already is online with pharmacy records from CVS, Midlam told MedCity News, while MinuteClinics are able to bring up clinical summaries and test results from St. Luke’s. Patients must consent for any sharing to take place, Midlam said.
An initial application of this integration is in medication adherence. For patients who opt in, anytime a St. Luke’s-affiliated practitioner sends an electronic prescription to a CVS pharmacy, the pharmacy can confirm whether or not the individual picked up the script. CVS is able to send an alert back to the health system if the patient does not show up.
While this certainly helps improve pharmacy sales for CVS, it also simplifies disease management and potentially lowers costs for St. Luke’s, Midlam explained. “For the hospitals, it can reduce readmissions,” he said.
In addition, both CVS and St. Luke’s will be able to know when a common patient visits a MinuteClinic or shows up in an emergency room. “It makes care coordination easier and less time-consuming,” Midlam said.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
St. Luke’s will be transitioning to an Epic Systems EHR over the next several years — the same vendor CVS is moving to at MinuteClinic — but for now, the health system operates a hodgepodge of technology at its hospitals and nearly 200 outpatient sites. The two entities built an interface with Health Level Seven International standards, according to Midlam.
“Technology is easier to work with than it was 3-4 years ago,” he said. “Consumers are demanding [interoperability] to be easier.”
