VoicePort looks toward comprehensive offerings with CLARO
VoicePort arrived in Boston for the National Association of Chain Drug Stores’ Total Store Expo this year with a new name for its suite of pharmacy technology offerings. The company rebranded its PharmaPhonetics property as CLARO Pharmacy Solutions — a name change aimed at highlighting the growth the company’s offerings have seen since starting out in 2003, according to VoicePort VP North American business development Alphonse J. Sasso.
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“As an organization, we have expanded beyond traditional patient messaging, and we wanted to be sure that our branding reflected that expansion and more accurately expressed who we are,” Sasso told Drug Store News. “Our portfolio has expanded and is very diverse now, and includes turnkey patient interventions that are ready off the shelf or can be customized ... to target toward our pharmacy client’s individual strategies ... and give them the full suite of activity to make that happen.”
CLARO’s suite of solutions has a foundation in patient outreach, offering both inbound and outbound IVR, as well as patient segmentation and campaign management tools that allow pharmacists to drill down by disease state to help reach the right patients. These can be combined with such offerings as CLARO’s Immunization Intelligence Services. A valuable public health service, which through a partnership with Scientific Technologies Corp., can help pharmacies identify patients who would benefit from immunizations based on accepted clinical standards and their available vaccine administration history.
“The pharmacy can make automated notifications via CLARO to a patient, letting them know that they are in need of a specific vaccine and, if the patient indicates that they want to hear more information, that’s recorded in the portal,” Sasso said. “Then the pharmacy team can contact that patient to discuss and schedule the administration.”
Beyond outreach, CLARO can provide medication synchronization services that leverage an appointment-based model to help improve medication adherence. In addition to aligning a patient’s medications and making a monthly appointment with the pharmacist, the med sync solution opens up other opportunities for the pharmacist to offer information about other clinical services.
“It’s been used very successfully to keep patients on track with their multiple meds, picking them up once a month.” he said, adding that it allows “pharmacy team members to do more than just fill and bill, but to become very consultative and involved in the overall patient’s health by meeting with them once a month to address any needs like patient education, immunizations or MTM services we have available in our portal.”
Because a large component of adherence is understanding how medication should be taken, CLARO includes Meducation materials through VoicePort’s partnership with Polyglot Systems. The partnership allows CLARO partner pharmacies to offer medication instructions for 90% of the most commonly prescribed drugs in 22 different languages, as well as in varying font sizes.
“Right now, one-third of the United States is considered low health literate, meaning that when they get a prescription, they would benefit from simple-to-understand instructions aimed at proper administration and improved adherence,” Sasso said. “The Meducation tool is written at a 5th- and 6th-grade reading level, and makes use of pictograms to further reinforce dosing regimens.”
CLARO positions the pharmacy team to actively identity, manage and measure results for targeted populations based on the pharmacy client’s criteria and clinical objectives. Sasso also notes that though CLARO’s solutions are comprehensive, it’s possible for pharmacy partners to choose individual services and technology from among the suite of offerings.
“The nice thing is you can take a look at the entire portfolio or you can look at the a la carte options,” Sasso said. “We can work right alongside some of our competitors and still very nicely help our clients fulfill their requirements.”
VOICEPORT
HQ: Rochester, N.Y.
Founded: 2003
CEO: Chris Mann
Specialty: Technology platforms