CVS Pharmacy debuts ScriptPath Prescription Schedule
WOONSOCKET, R.I. — CVS Pharmacy’s latest initiative is making medication management easier for patients with multiple prescriptions. The company has debuted the ScriptPath Prescription Schedule, which shows all of a patient’s current prescription information in one place. The schedule features easy-to-understand icons that indicated when a patient should take a medication and how much should be taken in each dose.
The ScriptPath Prescription Schedule looks to meet the needs of the 50% of patients who report confusion about how and when to take their medications, as well as patients with complex prescription regimens. With the initiative, patients with five or more medications will automatically receive counseling from the pharmacist about their medication and be given a ScriptPath Prescription Schedule, and any patient or their caregiver can request one. In addition to meeting patient needs, the initiative is bringing patients more touch points with pharmacists, CVS Pharmacy EVP pharmacy services Kevin Hourican told Drug Store News.
“We are a pharmacy innovation company, our purpose is to help people on their path to better health. We know there's tremendous confusion out there … [and] our pharmacists want to do this kind of work,” Hourican said. “We want to be able to holistically understand the patient's medication regimen and more importantly, help the patient understand their medication regimen and counsel them on the medication they're taking and the front-store products they're taking to go along with it.”
Hourican said that in its beta stage, pharmacists helped counsel 50,000 patients who were taking their medications at the wrong time within the larger population of patients counseled. And with it now live in CVS Pharmacy's more than 9,700 retail pharmacy locations, the patient population that will automatically receive counseling is roughly 9 million patients.
The information for the ScriptPath Prescription Schedule is generated through a robust clinical engine that uses prescriber instructions to provide dosage and interval information and reconcile dosing times across a patient’s medication regimen. It also can understand prescriptions in English s and Spanish. CVS Pharmacy also has planned a 2018 roll out of a new prescription label, designed by the mind behind Target’s ClearRx prescription packaging system and inventor and lead designer of the ScriptPath system Deborah Adler, who ensured all elements of the ScriptPath system easy to read and understand, as well as developed clear icons and intuitive layout for the system.
“What’s really great about this project is it's a marriage of really crisp design voice that Deborah brings to the table and the deep clinical, innovative pharmacy technology that only CVS can bring forward,” Hourican told Drug Store News. “The marriage of the two together is what makes this project exciting to us, and we think our customers and patients are going to react to it in a favorable way.”