As National Kidney Month comes to a close and we get into National Autism Awareness Month, let’s take a moment to remember the importance of ensuring that patients take their medications as prescribed. Consider the multiple immunosuppressant medications prescribed to a patient after a kidney transplant, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) prescribed to children with autism and adults with stress disorders, or the different hypnotics prescribed to patients with sleep disorders. These medications must be administered correctly and refilled on time. Having a tool to monitor how patients take their medications saves administrative time for the practice and the pharmacy, and ensures the best medical outcome for the patient.
Applying Population Health Management to Prescriptions
On the National Kidney Foundation’s website, Jenny Shen, M.D., emphasizes the need to take medications as they are prescribed: “Some people are very strict about taking their medications in the beginning but become less adherent over time, while others are the opposite, developing a consistent regimen over time. It’s important to identify the factors that might be related to different patterns so we can build tools to improve adherence to medications.” The key is consistency, making sure that patients adhere to their regimen from the beginning and over the course of their treatment.
Population Health Management uses normative data sets, in this case, data from pharmacies, to provide a baseline against which patient prescription data is gauged. PrognoCIS EHR is integrated with Medication Management for Adherence software from Surescripts, which works with pharmacies to establish normative data sets for prescriptions. This way, when the practitioner enters a patient’s prescription data into PrognoCIS, the Medication Management for Adherence software gauges how well the patient is sticking to their prescription regimen.
Integrated Medication Management for Adherence in EHR Software
PrognoCIS EHR has been involved with Medication Management for Adherence through our strong partnership with SureScripts’ development accelerator program and is currently transitioning from beta testing to general availability. In the near future, in your practice, you may begin to see pop ups like these, which are Medication Adherence alerts:
Surescripts will send an alert to the practitioner through PrognoCIS in instances where the patient data shows variation from the regimen prescribed by the physician, either by leaving the medication course mid-way or by not picking up their refills. This ensures that physicians maintain awareness of how their patients are taking their prescriptions, which saves time and results in better medical outcomes.
General Availability Rollout Plans for Medication Management for Adherence
Currently, this feature is only available only as part of our beta program to test and acquire feedback about the performance of this new feature. However, it will soon be available in the broader use of the application as more pharmacy data is available, and as specific demographic sectors are included in the program. The expected initial demographics, as indicated by the illustration, describe the scenario where practitioners will see these notifications today. Surescripts program currently works through Medicare and partners with specific pharmacies to roll out the program.
PrognoCIS will continue providing updates regarding the general availability of Medication Management for Adherence, so our providers can recognize these alert messages and the value of greater insight into the patient’s adherence to the various prescriptions in their regimen. Clicking any of these messages as they appear will not result in any charges or fees to your practice.
Visit our e-Prescriptions page for more information on integrated prescriptions in PrognoCIS EHR.
