Driving healthier outcomes: Q&A with Ateb's Frank Sheppard
Ateb provides technology solutions to help independent and chain pharmacies improve patient adherence through education, pharmacy interventions and patient reminders. Drug Store News recently spoke with president and CEO Frank Sheppard.
DSN: Adherence obviously is a major opportunity for pharmacy to take a huge bite out of healthcare costs. What are some of the biggest barriers to improving patient adherence?
Frank Sheppard: The biggest barrier to improving patient adherence is the misconception that more refills equates to improved adherence. Real improvement in patient adherence requires a focused, longitudinal commitment from the pharmacy to educate and help the patient make deliberate behavior change. Tactics focused solely on increasing the number of fills, ... including “autofill programs,” refill reminders through calls, text messages, point-of-sale printouts and letters, are not enough.
DSN: Certainly, there has been a great deal of focus these days around medication synchronization. Ateb has a unique med sync solution — can you talk to us about the Time My Meds programs and why pharmacies really should be considering some type of med sync solution?
Sheppard: Medication synchronization originated from a notion of providing another convenience for those patients taking multiple medications. What we have learned from our pharmacy partners’ data is that the benefits of having patients participate in our Time My Meds program goes far beyond convenience to include dramatic improvement in medication adherence.
Ateb’s Time My Meds program leverages and automates the management of an appointment-based model to allow the pharmacy to improve patient adherence. Using an ABM med sync program helps the pharmacy team create ongoing dialogue with the patient to address questions and concerns, and to proactively address the patients’ entire medication regimen. As one Ateb pharmacy partner [noted], “ABM with med sync is like doing a mini-CMR every month for all of my Time My Meds patients.” This ongoing dialogue ... helps ... begin to address the common barriers to being adherent: health literacy, financial, logistics and communications.
Ateb’s portfolio of patient care solutions resides on our proprietary platform, which we call our Patient Management Access Portal. PMAP provides guidance to the pharmacy staff and allows them to document patient interventions and schedule follow-up actions with their patients. Each month, the pharmacist is able to proactively assess, at a patient-level view, each Time My Meds patient and determine the pharmacy’s strategy with that patient for the upcoming prescription cycle, for instance, scheduling a CMR or TMR, point-of-care testing, etc.
DSN: Let’s talk about return on investment — what are some of the real benefits these types of investments can deliver?
Sheppard: At Ateb we consider ROI in terms of clinical and financial results, and the impact of our solutions to the various stakeholders in the healthcare continuum — the patient, the pharmacy and the health plan. In the case of medication synchronization, the evidence reveals benefits to the patients associated with managing their chronic conditions, benefits to the health plan through the mitigation of emergency department events and improved performance against Star ratings and HEDIS measures, and benefits to the pharmacy through improved prescription growth with its existing patients and establishment of new revenue channels through pay-for-performance health plan opportunities.
The economic benefits of Ateb’s Time My Meds have been well documented, with independent studies [conducted by the National Community Pharmacists Association], including showing double-digit increases in the number of medications filled by patients enrolled in a medication synchronization program:
Twenty additional fills per patient per year;
First-fill abandonment was reduced more than 90%;
Use of automation yielded a 35% higher enrollment rate than manual medication synchronization programs; and
A greater than 50% improvement in adherence based on the number of medications achieving an 80% PDC measurement.
DSN: Are these types of solutions really just for the big chains or are these also within reach of the small independent pharmacy owner?
Sheppard: Chains need a consistent, measurable and manageable platform for deployment across all of their pharmacies; however, independents need the ability to adapt to their customers and existing processes. Ateb has provided the flexibility within our solutions to allow both chains and independents to use technology to maximize their business according to their defined objectives and needs. This differentiation is key to Ateb’s success and, most importantly, to our partner pharmacies’ success.
DSN: Clearly, changes in reimbursement structure are driving all of this. But in this new pay-for-performance era we are entering in health care, reimbursement will be driven largely by the ability to improve patient outcomes — which means pharmacies are going to need to be able to capture that data and report it back to payers. How is Ateb helping to solve for this?
Sheppard: At the core of Ateb’s ABM platform and Time My Meds is the integration of ‘big data’ into actionable steps. To effectively help patients achieve better outcomes, the pharmacy must be able to identify which patients need what intervention and when. The only way to do this is to leverage the tremendous amount of data available to pharmacy and make that data easy to use. Ateb’s commitment to our pharmacy partners includes:
Helping them to develop processes to more effectively interact with their patients to drive healthier patient outcomes;
Identifying and winning new pay-for-success opportunities that remunerate our pharmacy partners for engaging patients and helping patients achieve healthier outcomes; and
Proving to health plans and payers that pharmacy is a reliable, scalable and impactful partner for helping them deliver better, more affordable patient health outcomes.