North Carolina ACO Seeks to Improve Medication Adherence
Accountable care organization Triad HealthCare Network has launched an initiative to improve medication adherence among high-risk patient populations across five counties in North Carolina.
Triad is a provider-led accountable care organization located in Greensboro, N.C. It serves nearly 200,000 people in Alamance, Guilford, Randolph, Rockingham, and part of Forsyth counties. It is sponsored by Cone Health and is governed and operated by a board of managers and a physician-led operating committee.
The ACO is working with vendor DrFirst on an effort to speed access to prescription fill data that will empower providers to identify patients with chronic conditions who may not be taking their medications as prescribed and intervene early to alleviate barriers to adherence that can lead to gaps in care, poor outcomes, and hospital readmissions.
It has been estimated that each year, patients failing to take their medications due to factors such as cost, access, coverage status, dosage complexity, or concerns about side effects causes about $125,000 deaths and costs the U.S. healthcare system nearly $250 billion.
“Since patients’ medication records are typically fragmented across the care continuum, our clinicians are excited about DrFirst’s ability to provide current, comprehensive, and easy-to-access medication history, which will enhance our ability to deliver the right care at the right time. This ability is especially important among patients at high risk of complications, such as those with diabetes or congestive heart failure,” said Hanna Park, PharmD, executive director of value-based performance at Triad HealthCare Network, in a statement. “In addition, we will be able to further improve care coordination and prevent avoidable admissions and emergency visits due to medication issues.”
DrFirst’s MedHx solution streamlines medication reconciliation workflows by providing the most accurate and clinically actionable medication history for individual patients at hospital admission and in the emergency department. For population risk management, MedHx PRM expands prescription fill data to a population of patients to enable risk stratification and identification of those who would benefit from early and targeted care interventions. Using clinical analytics, care managers can create panels of high-risk patients or import them from an EHR system and then identify those who are not adhering to medication therapies. In particular, ACOs need access to timely and accurate data to ensure patients get appropriate care while avoiding unnecessary duplication of services and preventing medical errors.
“For ACOs to deliver on their promise of coordinated patient care, they need to gather clinical data from multiple systems and structure it in a way that makes it useful for clinicians,” said G. Cameron Deemer, president of DrFirst, in a statement. “Triad HealthCare Network is the first ACO to use MedHx PRM to collect medication data from payers, prescription benefit managers, and EHRs. By pulling thousands of de-duplicated patient medication histories automatically and quickly—usually within hours rather than months—clinicians can meaningfully intervene with patients before they end up back in their local hospital’s emergency department.”
